The economy of Mindanao is dominated by the agriculture sector. With one-third of its land area devoted to agriculture, the island has been tagged as the country’s food basket. The majority of the country’s total production of high-value commodities, such as rubber, pineapple, banana and coffee, comes from Mindanao. It also supplies over 40 percent of the country’s food requirements and contributes more than 30 percent to the national food trade. The Department of Agriculture (DA) continues to stimulate productivity and gain wider market niches by harnessing emerging global opportunities for local producers. One such opportunity is the growing global market for Halal foods, known to be worth USD 2.95 billion for meat alone, which other non-Muslim countries such as Thailand, Australia, Brazil and Belgium have already successfully entered. In the 2004-2010 Medium Term Philippine Development Plan, Mindanao was cited as the part of the country most suited to the development of the Halal industry. The plan identified the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), the only region with Muslim identity, as the focal area for Halal development. The Philippine Development Plan (2017-2022) aims to expand the economic opportunities of those currently engaged in producing agriculture, forestry and fisheries products and, at the same time, increase access to economic opportunities for small farmers and fishers in order to achieve inclusive growth. The government will also continue to promote climate change adaptation measures, organic agriculture, urban agriculture and Halal food production.

Women smallholder farmers often face complex social and economic barriers that prevent them from exercising agency and securing decent livelihoods. This Discussion Summary Paper draws from an online discussion co-hosted by Business Fights Poverty, Unilever and Oxfam, on how companies and their partners can recognize, value, and enhance the contributions of the hidden women on whom our global food supply systems depend. Read it to learn about the key levers of change, case studies and lessons learned, and how to collaborate for transformational change.

Despite the widespread belief that marketing cooperatives’ benefits may extend beyond participating farmers, little is known about the cooperative’s effect on nonparticipating farmers. This paper exploits exogenous variation in language spoken at home in Thailand to obtain instrumental variable estimates of the spillover effect of marketing cooperatives. We hypothesize that farmers who sell rice to private intermediaries in the area where there is direct competition between marketing cooperatives and private intermediaries (treated areas) are likely to receive a higher price than those who sell rice in other areas. Using household-level data of rice farmers in Thailand in the marketing year 2018/19, we find strong evidence that farmers in treated areas receive 10.9% higher prices from private intermediaries than those in comparison areas. Our results provide crucial implications for food policy debates regarding the role of marketing cooperatives in agri-food value chains. In particular, evaluating the inclusiveness of marketing cooperatives toward poor farmers should not be limited to sampling and analyzing its members only. Failure to consider the spillover effect could lead to substantial underestimation of the impact of marketing cooperatives on societal welfare.