Benefits of public procurement from family farming in Latin-AMERICAN countries: Identification and prioritization

Abstract

In the fight against hunger and poverty eradication in Latin American and Caribbean countries, one of the principal innovations in recent strategies is known as Public Procurement from Family Farming (PP-FF), which links the public sector’s demand for food products destined for school feeding programs with the supply of local family farming producers. However, the benefits of this strategy have still not been clearly identified. This study aims to identify the benefits of PP-FF relevant in a Latin-American context and prioritize them based on their relative importance. To cover the identification objective; initially, the benefits were identified through an extensive literature review and grouped into three component categories: social, economic, and environmental. Those benefits in their respective components were put into judgment by a group of PP-FF experts from nine countries and then prioritized with the AHP model and ICC analysis. Results reveal the existence of 14 benefits/variables identified as short-term, long-term, direct, and indirect benefits. Eight of them have been prioritized and could become the core guideline for impact evaluation of this type of policies in Latin America, duty that is still pending to be accomplished.