Supply Chain and Market Design Optimization

Improving smallholder farmers’ welfare with digital technologies and policy intervention

In India and other agriculture-intensive developing countries, the government has made it a priority to improve the welfare of farmers. With collaborators on the ground in India, Professors Retsef Levi and Karen Zheng are working to develop, test, and evaluate a range of interventions and decision support tools to improve the efficiency and safety of agriculture supply chains, as well as to increase the welfare of farmers and consumers. Their current projects focus on: 1) performing systematic impact analysis and optimizing the design of digital agricultural platforms that enable efficient physical supply chains in resource constrained environments; 2) analyzing the impact of different government interventions (e.g., inventory procurement and release policies, consumer subsidy schemes) on stabilizing market prices of essential commodities; and 3) developing data-driven decision support tools to help smallholder farmers optimize their production and market decisions.

Technology interventions for optimization of smallholder supply chain

In South East Asia, Professor Joann de Zegher studies the design of mobile-based ERP systems and platforms to improve and digitize informal supply chains such as smallholder supply chains. Her main research program is currently focused on informal smallholder palm oil supply chains in Indonesia, which supply approximately 50% of Indonesia's palm oil, i.e. over 25% of the world's palm oil supply.

Her work focuses on developing new technologies for improved decision-making and transparency in these supply chains, collecting large digital datasets as a by-product. To do so, she combines methods from optimization, market design, and large-scale field work. This work is expected to achieve the joint goals of improved rural livelihoods, digitization and novel traceability data for first-mile food supply chains in developing and emerging markets, and to novel and large datasets that enable the use of advanced analytics. Finally, the traceability data can be combined with remote sensing data to advance environmentally responsible sourcing of palm oil, e.g. ensuring palm oil does not come from illegally deforested areas. This technology is currently in a piloting stage