Does market inclusion help farmers to eat better? Evaluation of LOOP aggregation scheme in Bangladesh

Abstract

Efforts to connect smallholders to markets are the basis of many value chain interventions in developing countries. However, in the case of nutritious foods like fruit and vegetables, this raises the question of whether such interventions increase consumption amongst the smallholders themselves, either from own-production or via market purchase from higher incomes. We investigate this question for a vegetable aggregation scheme called LOOP. LOOP enables smallholder farmers to sell their vegetables and access markets through village-level aggregators. We address the potential trade-off between market sale and own consumption by evaluating the impact of LOOP on output, revenue, and consumption.