This month, the Office for Market and Partnership Innovations would like to highlight different interventions that are creating opportunities for inclusive and sustainable market system development. Feed the Future supports investments across key priority areas aiming to stimulate and incentivize private sector investments in agriculture, improved trade conditions and opportunities, as well as continue to support increased agricultural productivity, employment and income generation for all.  

The U.S. Government’s Global Food Security Strategy, which Feed the Future implements, is ambitious and challenging, but it also provides an excellent framework to address hunger, poverty, malnutrition, and resilience in an inclusive and systemic way. To achieve the GFSS goals, we cannot cease to emphasize how important is to have a conducive enabling environment -- the set of formal and informal rules that create boundaries for market actors to operate within systems, fostering certainty and influencing the transaction costs of doing business. 

Policies, laws, cultural norms, and regulations impact the costs and risks borne by agricultural market actors, and therefore influence investment incentives, as well as the efficiency, inclusiveness, and performance of the entire system. Given the enabling environment’s influence on all aspects of decision-making and resource allocation within a market system, it presents important leverage points for poverty reduction, food security, economic growth, employment, ecological sustainability, and resilience.

There are so many aspects of the agricultural market system that need attention, but we would like to emphasize this month key enabling environment areas that are fundamental to achieve true impact at scale. To address as much as possible, each week during Enabling Environment for Agricultural Market Systems Month we will have a theme, including the enabling environment for private sector investment in agriculture and food security, market system development and metrics to quantify progress, nutritious and safe value chain development within the agriculture system, and resilient agricultural markets.

We will like to hear from you, our partners about your own experiences and successful interventions. Join us by sharing your own posts, commenting the ones we are sharing, and actively participating in other activities this month.