Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Ivo Syndicus

Location: U.K.
Primary academic field: Agricultural systems
Award category: PhD Holder

Topics to be Addressed during the Award Period:

How value chains of industrial chicken production in Bangladesh are organized, and how smallholder chicken farmers participate in them.

• Describe the ways in which smallholder commercial chicken farmers in Bangladesh participate in the industrial chicken production value chains in the country (e.g. through contract farming schemes and other arrangements for sourcing of input such as animal feed, and marketing of output and products).
• Explain how industrial chicken value chains in Bangladesh are organized (from chick hatcheries to retail of chicken meat to consumers), what roles are played by different people directly or indirectly involved in the value chains, how these roles present challenges and shape (so-called) "opportunities" for smallholder farmers.
• Highlight how smallholder farmers that are part of the value chains become tied into power relations and financial dependencies that disadvantage them (e.g. companies' contract farming schemes and ‘feed dealers’ who provide industrial production inputs on credit are unfair to them).
• Explain the serious constraints farmers face if they were to engage with chicken production and marketing outside these extractive relations.
• Suggest how alternatives to company-driven industrial production and value chains can be supported.

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• This application is about the reality of how small-scale chicken farmers in developing countries survive in a business world increasingly dominated by the "big guys" (i.e. large companies that control almost all parts of the value chains). A number of developing countries still have many smallholder farmers even though animal agriculture in these countries is seeing more and more industrial producers and production. For the time being, both small-scale and industrial systems exist side by side. How long will this last? Will industrial production be the winner that takes all and completely wipes out smallholders? Or can traditional, non-industrial smallholders still retain an important market share? How can they be assisted so they won't be exploited by the "big guys", remain as key contributors to the agricultural sector, and prosper? These are very important questions, and they are not easy to answer. To come up with answers, one needs to first understand in a tangible, concrete way what really is happening on the ground. And this application aims to do that. It uses Bangladesh to illustrate the day-to-day reality faced by small-scale farmers there as well as the actual (mostly negative) real-world impact value chains have on these farmers.
• Another strong point of this application is that it aims to "join up the dots" all along the value chains. This includes connecting both input (upstream) and output (downstream) markets, such as feed/input dealers, feed millers, breeders, hatcheries, company employees, livestock department officers, veterinarians, chicken wholesale traders and market retailers. Tracing and providing details of every step and every type of stakeholder relations enables one to look beyond farmers' experiences to understand system-level and structural features. It will also help to pinpoint potential areas of interventions at different levels.