6. CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Market policy reforms and technology development need to be viewed as different facets of the
same problem (Staatz 1994). Policy-oriented marketing research will need to expand its emphasis
from the liberalization of markets to the identification of strategies that will give the incentives to
invest in new productive patterns of investment and exchange for the millions of low-input semi-
subsistence rural households in the region. This implies a major role for future marketing research
in identifying institutional arrangements that can coordinate exchange of inputs, credit, and output
markets in a manner profitable to all system participants (including farmers). These solutions will
be fundamentally country-specific, dependent upon the current set of market rules, property
rights, exchange arrangements, experience and perceptions derived from history, and
organizational structure in each country. Promising areas for future research involve how to
create the incentives, through attention to the institutional underpinnings of markets, for
coordination between farmer organizations (accountable to farmers), multinational input and
commodity trading firms, a supportive public sector, and an expanded role for commodity
exchanges, forward contracting, and other mechanisms to reduce the costs and risks of investing
in the entire food system. Finding workable strategies to implement these scenarios is likely to be
the key challenge for food marketing research in Africa well into the twenty-first century.
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