Two decades after initiating sweeping market reforms in their agricultural sectors, governments across Sub-Saharan Africa continue to maintain an active role in staple food markets. At the heart of this highly interventionist approach to food market development is a persistent and widespread distrust of private sector actors’ participation in food markets. Of all the private sector actors involved in African cereal markets, none has been more maligned or misunderstood than the private traders who assemble grain at the village-level or assembly traders as we refer to them in this paper
