Smallholder farmers challenges to supply institutional markets : a case study

Smallholder farmers face a number of difficulties in accessing the market, whether through local or informal sales, indirect sales through intermediaries or direct integration with the agribusiness. Purchases by the government through institutional markets emerged as a further recent distribution path. Access to institutional markets is an alternative that aims to increase income for smallholder farmers in situations of vulnerability in Brazil. While laws exist to encourage the participation to such markets by smallholder farmers, many of them still cannot access these markets. Therefore, the aim of this article is to identify the challenges faced by family farmers to supply products to the institutional markets. Findings show several factors have an impact to access the institutional markets, such as processes of participation in public calls; processes of production of items and challenges of delivering products

A decision support model for assisting smallholder farmers on bidding to supply to institutional markets

In Brazil, institutional markets emerged as an opportunity for family farmers to distribute their produce and secure and income. However, the lengthy bureaucratic process and relatively high cost associated to the bidding process for such markets determine the challenge faced by family farmers to decide which public calls to subscribe to in order to distribute their products to schools and public institutions through governmental programs as PAA and PNAE. This research proposes a Decision Support System (DSS) based on a mathematical model to help the farmers in the bid/no-bid decision. Based on the individual profitability of the products and the geographical area value concentration criterion, the DSS suggests to the farmers which bids to attend in order to obtain the expected highest profit if the bids are secured

A data envelopment approach to support the bid/no-bid decision of smallholder farmers on public calls participation

Institutional markets are one of the main sources of income for smallholder farmers in Brazil. Among these markets, the National School Meal Program (PNAE) offers to the farmers the opportunity to supply food for public schools. There may exist distinct PNAE public calls for each school. The participation of the smallholder farmers in these public calls may be limited by their scarce sources. Thus, it became necessary to create a tool to support their decision whether they should or not take part in the completion of attending a public call. The objective of this paper is to propose a tool for priority setting decision. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied to rank the public calls (where the public calls are incorporated into the model as Decision-Making Units - DMUs) using the relative efficiency as a ranking criterion, also the methodology proposed to evaluate the bid/no-bid decisions using DEA, applying the Composite Index (CI) tie-breaking method to all DMUs in the context of institutional markets for smallholder farmers, considers all efficient and inefficient DMU as a choice if profitable, which makes it also different from what was done in the literature. The final result shows a priority attending setting to the smallholder farmers, according to the efficiency rank. An empirical application for a group of smallholder farmers in the Brazilian State of Goiás is presented. The main contribution is helping smallholder farmers to make more grounded decisions and the application of DEA model in conjunction with tie-breaking technique of the composite index (Leta et al., 2005) for a bid/no-bid supporting-decision tool in a new context (institutional markets for smallholder farmers) and considering the inefficient DMUs if profitable

Demographic, clinical and antibody characteristics of patients with digital ulcers in systemic sclerosis: data from the DUO Registry

OBJECTIVES: The Digital Ulcers Outcome (DUO) Registry was designed to describe the clinical and antibody characteristics, disease course and outcomes of patients with digital ulcers associated with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS: The DUO Registry is a European, prospective, multicentre, observational, registry of SSc patients with ongoing digital ulcer disease, irrespective of treatment regimen. Data collected included demographics, SSc duration, SSc subset, internal organ manifestations, autoantibodies, previous and ongoing interventions and complications related to digital ulcers. RESULTS: Up to 19 November 2010 a total of 2439 patients had enrolled into the registry. Most were classified as either limited cutaneous SSc (lcSSc; 52.2%) or diffuse cutaneous SSc (dcSSc; 36.9%). Digital ulcers developed earlier in patients with dcSSc compared with lcSSc. Almost all patients (95.7%) tested positive for antinuclear antibodies, 45.2% for anti-scleroderma-70 and 43.6% for anticentromere antibodies (ACA). The first digital ulcer in the anti-scleroderma-70-positive patient cohort occurred approximately 5 years earlier than the ACA-positive patient group. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides data from a large cohort of SSc patients with a history of digital ulcers. The early occurrence and high frequency of digital ulcer complications are especially seen in patients with dcSSc and/or anti-scleroderma-70 antibodies