Interviews with Firms and Other Key Stakeholders in the Agro-Processing Sectors of South Africa and Tanzania, 2019-2020

Bowman, Andrew (2024). Interviews with Firms and Other Key Stakeholders in the Agro-Processing Sectors of South Africa and Tanzania, 2019-2020. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855195

The return of industrial policy to many African countries over the past decade has been accompanied by increased focus on promoting agro-processing, the value-adding activities for food between harvest and final consumption. This is because agro-processing is widely recognised among academics and policymakers as having exceptionally high potential to propel inclusive industrial growth which creates jobs and relieves poverty.

Agro-processing is generally a high labour-intensity and low technology-intensity entry point to industrial activity, and therefore provides an opportunity for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to enter industrial activities. It also has strong links to primary agricultural production which supports the livelihoods of many of the poorest people in developing countries. Harnessing agro-processing is additionally important at present because demand for processed food is soaring across sub-Saharan Africa.

However, creating inclusive value chains which integrate small producers and enable them to seize this opportunity is a difficult policy challenge. SMEs often face high barriers to entry, or lack the technological capabilities to deliver goods with the quality, speed and reliability demanded by new urban retailers like supermarkets. This research seeks to address this challenge and produce new insights which help improve industrial policy for agro processing. Specifically, it will investigate how governments can foster the inclusion of SMEs in food value chains and help them upgrade their technological capabilities. It does so using a contrasting case study method to examine the political economy of agro-processing value chains for maize milling, citrus fruit and dairy products in South Africa and Tanzania. The stark differences between these two very different contexts for agro-processing has the potential to generate unique insights into the political economy constraints on inclusive industrialization.

The aims of this research are threefold: first, to describe and contrast the institutional features that determine innovation and inclusion in agro-processing in Tanzania and South Africa. Second, to develop a comparative political economy of agro-processing that explains the challenges to promoting SME capabilities through targeted industrial policies, and third, to distil policy-relevant implications to support industrial policy formulation at the national and regional level. The project is an inter-disciplinary collaboration between researchers the University of Edinburgh's Centre of African Studies (CAS), the Tanzanian think-tank the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) and the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg. The researchers will fulfill the aims with in-depth research on citrus, maize and dairy value chains in both countries. This will involve surveys of SME agro-processing firms and interviews with key informants in government, the private sector and civil society. This will draw on the team's interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological expertise from political economy, economics and science and technology studies. The research will contribute to improving agro-processing industrial policy initiatives in South Africa and Tanzania by providing evidence on how governments can best support the inclusion and technological upgrading of agro-processing SMEs. Its academic outputs will advance a growing body of sholarship on the political economy of industrial policy and firm-level technological capabilities in developing countries.

Data description (abstract)

The data deposit comprises: (1) summary notes from 95 semi-structured key informant interviews with a range of stakeholders in the agro-processing sectors of South Africa and Tanzania, including firms, policymakers and industry associations. (2) spreadsheets containing responses to structured questionnaire interviews with 21 dairy processing firms in South Africa, 18 maize processing firms in South Africa, 21 dairy processing firms in Tanzania, and 23 maize processing firms in Tanzania.

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