This is one of the interesting questions in Argo-SCM. My educational answer for the Pre-COVID is a variation of co-operative and direct-to-consumer model.

Some may include blockchain (tech/safety), ecotourism and GI (marketing), smart farming and distributing (efficiency)

The Post-COVID solution is to been seen.

One way of decreasing the imperfections in the supply chain is use of online selling apps and direct selling.

Abdelrahman Ali

Dear Researcher,

Greetings from India. This is my first interaction with you. In the beginning, let me thank you for such a beautiful question.

You have raised the question in the context of the developing economies. I am an Indian and India is also a developing economy. So, I am answering the question with reference to India.

In India, I have studied that the competitive advantage of the middlemen is the lack of development of transport and communication infrastructure. Thus, the consumers are forced to depend on the middlemen and the middlemen continue to take advantage of the prevailing circumstances. If these middlemen are eliminated, then the prices of the commodities will go down, thereby creating more demand. The Government of India realized this and started building the infrastructure of the country way back in 2002-3 under the leadership of the then Prime Minister, A. B. Vajpayee. The current Prime Minster had also been heavily investing in building infrastructure.

I won't say that the problem has been solved entirely but rate of growth of commodities have been checked to some extent.

So, this is a way of reducing the number of middlemen across vegetables and fruits supply chain in developing economies.

Thank you.

Best regards,

Anamitra.

Truncated the unnecessary intermediaries in the supply-chain even in doing so we could end up in re-intermediation as long as we could get more values to our customer as well as our organization.

https://adataanalyst.com/e-business/difference-disintermediation-re-intermediation-counter-mediation/

There are 4 general roles:

I believe that every player on the supply-chain plays a role, though the contribution of each is debatable, specially more so for agents, brokers and traders. It is known that the farmers receives the least of the profit share versus all other players based on the risk-taken by each of these participants on the supply chain. There are two types of participants - 1. Produce, process, and own the commodity as it moves across the supply chain e.g. farmers, processors, manufacturers, distributors, etc.2. Facilitate or support the flow of goods e.g. government and banks (other support service providers like insurance, logistics, transportation, etc.)

To address this ideally, we need allow all of them to play their respective roles and get paid for their contribution for risk they take - how can this be achieved? by making markets efficient? The government sector has a role to play by building an efficient hard and soft infrastructure - which includes developing a fair market ecosystem for all participants. On the soft infrastructure side (policies and regulations) - incentives, subsidies, documentations, compliance and taxes. For hard infrastructure - logistics, transportation, energy and support services. The middle-men as we call them are classed as - brokers, traders and agents, play the role of intermittent connections (fill-up support service gaps on the supply chain), acting more like facilitators for: matching buyers & sellers (marketplace), financing (crop or working capital), knowledge sharing (including innovations), negotiations and arbitration, etc. One great way of increasing efficiency in market is to deploy digitalization tools like - marketplaces, exchanges, etc., but these still have limited penetration, and may just supplement the role of middle-men (though reducing their numbers and some role on the supply chain, but not negating it fully); its surprising to see that even digital platforms have significant size of brokers, agents and traders building transactions than actually farmers.

Reads:

Article Agricultural marketing and supply chain management in Tanzan...

Chapter The role of innovation brokers in agricultural innovation systems

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JADEE-06-2017-0065/full/html

Ideally, increasingly dominant large retailers would still treat less powerful chain members (e.g. small farms) fairly in these supply chains. Unless this is the case in practice, there is an important role for organisations like cooperatives to play particularly in developing countries. In this context, it might be useful to consolidate the “cooperative” base from a policy making perspective.

First of all, congratulations on the research topic. Even though I am not a research in this specific field, I would like to share some highlights from the Brazilian scenario:

• Such as Ms. Pasha I would suggest an investigation of the middleman role in the specific supply chain. For instance, in a developing country with a large area, long distances from origin to destination such as Brazil you have the middleman with a role of diminishing the transportation risk;
• The middleman can act as a financier to the producer, by paying the production in advance, reducing the financial risk of the producer. This is also important in countries whose financing is still difficult to small farmers like Brazil;
• The intermediary agent can act as an important link between the producer and a long and powerful supply chain that transforms the raw materials in processed and ultra processed food;
• I believe that cooperatives to share the risk of investment in production and transport can be a good way such as pointed by Mr. Yang. However, in Brazil the management and communication in cooperatives is also a challenge when there is a huge level of heterogeneity of agents, from production capital to education.

In conclusion, believe that policies towards the following factors can be the key:

• Logistics
• Financing and Taxation
• Education

The Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) is the most important research organization in this area in Brazil. I suggest you to contact some researcher from there:

https://www.embrapa.br/en/international-operations

Hope to hear more from your findings.

Sincerely,

Francielly Marinho

1. In international transportation, it is difficult to reduce the number of intermediaries due to the passage of customs pharmacies.

Within the country, you can shorten.

2. If the intermediary increases the value of the goods, then the tax also increases.

Wholesale markets on the outskirts of large cities, open for producers to sell their products to marketers, traders or consumers looking for specific items.

📷

The problem to reduce the number of middlemen can be solved by uniting farmers in cooperatives. Many countries have done just that.

The problem can be solved by tackling supply chain logistics and infrastructure.Farmers can form cooperatives and aggregate produce, store them in temperature controlled environments.With proper road infrastructure and supply chain logistics,farmers would not be in haste to sell their products

Information technologies, ICT and Internet and Industry 4.0, which enable the development of e-logistics and shortening logistics chains, can be helpful in this matter.

Regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

Information technologies and e-logistics are not a viable solution in developing countries. Most of the farmers and supply chain production ends are not e-literate and have internet.

The govt intervention for the creation of regional hubs and vegetable processing plants may do the magic.

This is indeed an interesting issue. Everyone has contributed valuable ideas to this discussion. I would like to draw your attention to problems burdening producers of fruits and vegetables in developing countries. These producers lack consistency in supply and quality. These problems highlight the importance of the 4 general roles of intermediaries mentioned earlier by Mohammad Khairul Anwar. Middlemen deal with these problems for consumers' convenience. There might be many middlemen along the supply chain as there are many works need to be done. Each work contributes added-value to the produces. Thus, it is common to see the payment enjoyed by the producers is just a small portion of what is paid by the end consumers. Accordingly, the appropriate policy for reducing the number of middlemen is to strengthen the producers. They must be able to manage the consistency of supply and quality of their produces. They also need to give added-value as much as possible to the produces.