SOFA Hidden Costs
Though there is no recorded case of use as a TCA methodology, the market systems development (MSD) approach is a potentially useful tool that can be used to identify and understand the underlying causes of the hidden costs in agrifood systems. While the approach largely lends itself to the development of interventions to promote the inclusion of marginalised people in market systems; its focus on addressing the factors that influence outcomes of relationships and transactions between people, organisations, and institutions in the market system makes it a suitable approach to identifying the hidden costs. Furthermore, by placing the value chains at the centre of the framework of the approach, it can apply to a range of scopes which include the global, sectoral, and single-product scopes. The SOFA 2023 already had tenets of the approach when considering the markets, institutional and policy failures in the agrifood system but what may be required is to analyse the root causes of these failures which is what policy can try to address.
Sra. Cleopatra Ngulube