Making the case for Institutional Demand: Supporting smallholders through procurement and food assistance programmes

•Enabling households to make investments: A secure livelihood allows households to purchase inputs that leads to increased productivity.•Expanding coping strategies: stable incomes prevents households from making distress sales and other choices that undermine future welfare.•Contributing to food security: institutional demand benefits vulnerable groups through food distribution mechanisms.•Providing a valuable safety net: institutional demand helps to ensure a minimum income and guarantees entry into a market.•Promoting local development: increased demand for food can promote local development with spillover effects increasing market linkages.

This paper focuses on the rationale for supporting market interventions for smallholders through what we call Institutional Demand. Institutional Demand consists of different interventions that target procurement from smallholder farmers and distribute their surplus to vulnerable populations. This policy intervention links the goals of both agricultural development and social protection through three key areas: price stabilization; income generation and; food security. We argue that Institutional Demand should be a key policy intervention as it can directly address both rural poverty and malnutrition. It does this by linking the productive capacity of smallholder farmers with populations living in situations of food insecurity. Impact evaluations and assessments of Institutional Demand programmes are limited in scope and depth. Therefore, while this paper outlines much of the evidence thus far, the primary purpose of this paper is to push forward a new research agenda that looks at the ways in which Institutional Demand can promote policy synergies between the goals of social protection and agricultural development. The issues outlined in this paper present fruitful areas for more qualitative and quantitative assessments of Institutional Demand programmes.