Chapter 8: Markets: Agriculture, Value Chains, and Cooperatives¶

Before March 11, 2011, the Omoe fishing cooperative in Miyako, on the coast of Iwate Prefecture in Japan, prided itself on the country's largest harvest of farmed wakame seaweed and wild abalone. Its members also fished for salmon and kelp.

The tsunami swept away 798 of the cooperative's 814 boats. The facilities where the seaweed was grown and processed were completely destroyed.

Three days after the earthquake, the head of the cooperative set up a crisis team. Its goal fit on one line: get back to fishing as fast as possible. The cooperative bought used boats on the Sea of Japan coast, which the tsunami had not touched. It repaired the boats left stuck in the debris or stranded on high ground by the wave. In May, seventy boats went out to harvest wild wakame.

Seventy boats, for a fleet that once had 814: not nearly enough. So the cooperative invented a rule. Fishers formed groups of four or five that shared the available boats, and until the fleet was rebuilt, the catch was split equally among the members of each group. In 2012, as the number of boats neared normal, the organization gradually returned to its original form.

The Japanese Reconstruction Agency sums up the result in one sentence: fishers who had lost their boats were able to resume fishing early "without incurring any personal debt."

Japan is a wealthy country, and the government subsidized the cooperatives to buy back boats and nets. The sharing rule, though, required no purchase at all. It rested on an organization that existed before the wave, knew its members, and had their trust.

What the scene teaches¶

The Omoe cooperative did not wait for someone to hand it a new fleet. It looked for what was missing to get the chain moving again: boats, any boats, right away. Three lessons come out of this for your club.

First: a market is a chain, and a disaster breaks one specific link. What kept the Omoe fishers from working was the boats. They knew how to fish, and the fishing grounds were still there. Elsewhere, it will be a wholesaler's warehouse, a buyer's credit, a road, a cold room. Before you act, find that link.

Second: you repair the chain with the people who held it. The cooperative already existed, with its rules, its members, its cash, its relationships with the government. It was the channel the government used for its subsidies, and it was the one that could impose sharing. An organization created after the disaster to receive aid would have had neither that authority nor that trust.

Third: the calendar is in charge. Wild wakame is harvested in spring. A new fleet delivered in September would have missed the season. In farming as in fishing, nature sets the deadline, not the project.

This chapter covers the markets where people sell what they produce, the chains that link them to buyers, and the cooperatives that help restart them. Physical places, streets and market halls, are the subject of Chapter 9.

What disasters cost agriculture¶

In 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published its most complete estimate. Over the past thirty years, from 1991 to 2021, disasters are estimated to have cost about $3,800 billion in agricultural production, or 123 billion a year on average, 5% of global agricultural gross domestic product. The figure covers only crops and livestock; fisheries and forestry are left out for lack of data.

The same study reviewed 88 Post-Disaster Needs Assessments (PDNAs) carried out between 2007 and 2022 in 60 countries. On average, agriculture accounts for 23% of damage and losses across all sectors, and more than 65% for droughts. The FAO itself points out the limit: these assessments are conducted only after a small number of disasters, in countries with relatively less capacity to cope.

In a rural area, the lost harvest is only the start: the next crop still has to be planted, sold, and bought by someone.

The principle: restore market actors, do not replace them¶

Chapter 5 set out the rule of the Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS, third edition, 2017): all aid affects markets, and those who deliver it must not take on a market function themselves. This chapter draws the practical consequences.

The MERS chapter on enterprise and market systems captures the spirit in the title of its fourth standard, "Work with existing market actors and use facilitation approaches." Three recommendations from that chapter apply directly to a club.

Do not forget the intermediaries. The MERS observe that project teams do not always understand that intermediaries, "wholesalers and middlemen," play an important role in the market. The collector who buys in the village and resells in town is often the only link between the producer and the customer.

Buy local, even at a slightly higher price. When in-kind aid is justified, the MERS recommend buying it from local private actors "despite higher costs, where feasible." An order placed with the wholesaler in the next town gives back the cash that will let him restock.

Look at the whole chain, including outside the affected area. Chapter 5 cited the example, reported by the MERS, of farm inputs handed out free after an earthquake: the market analysis "had not extended to the suppliers in the market chain," and suppliers based outside the area lost their customers. So follow the chain all the way to the suppliers, wherever they are.

The MERS add a warning useful to any club that wants to help a business: beware the "relief boom," when some businesses are viable only as long as aid money and aid workers are part of the local economy. Before helping a business, ask yourself who its customers will be once the humanitarians have left.

Finding the broken link¶

A value chain is the full set of steps that take a product from the producer to the end customer: inputs, production, storage, processing, transport, sale, with people and money at every step. The CED guide gives the method for normal times. After a disaster, the question becomes: which link broke, and who held it?

The documented cases show that the answer is rarely the one you expect.

An intermediary's storage. In Port-au-Prince, after the 2010 earthquake, the hardest-hit link in the rice chain was the small wholesalers, who had lost their warehouses (Chapter 5).
A buyer's credit. In the state of Odisha, India, two cyclones destroyed the maize crop in 2013 and 2015. The large buyers, who used to advance seeds and inputs to farmers, stopped doing so after losing the money from unpaid harvests. The MERS conclude: "When credit for seeds and other inputs stopped, farmers stopped growing maize." The broken link was not a physical one.
A place to sell. In Shiogama, one month after the 2011 tsunami, a tuna boat was the first vessel to enter the port after activities resumed, and the fish market, a third of which was left intact, was able to hold its auctions (Chapter 4).
Equipment no one can pay for alone. In Kesennuma, in the completely devastated Shishiori district, 17 seafood processing companies hit by the disaster founded a cooperative in August 2012 to build, together, a large refrigeration facility and a seawater sterilization facility. According to the Reconstruction Agency, joint ownership sharply cut the investment cost for each one.

Link	Question to ask	Sign it is broken
Inputs	are seeds, nets, animal feed on sale?	shops closed, abnormal prices
Credit	who advanced the money before, and do they still?	buyers or suppliers who demand cash
Production	do producers have land, tools, boats, labor?	fields not planted, boats tied up
Storage and cold	where did products wait before being sold?	post-harvest losses, forced sales
Transport	are the road, truck, boat working?	collectors gone, village and town prices drifting apart
Buyers	who used to buy, and do they still?	unsold stock, falling farm-gate prices

The broken link is often in the middle of the chain, with an actor that distributions ignore. Your club can target a single link, provided the analysis has been done, by the club or by others (Chapter 3). The MERS point out that at the start of the response, a rough analysis is acceptable, because "'good enough' analysis is better than 'analysis paralysis'." But each later assessment must go deeper than the last.

Agriculture: plant on time, with what the market offers¶

The problem is often access, not seed¶

After a disaster, the first reflex is to send seeds. The two reference handbooks on seeds in emergencies warn against it. The FAO's 2010 technical handbook observes that after a disaster, "seed is often available but farmers do not have the resources to buy it." The handbook published in 2002 by CRS, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) goes further: absolute seed unavailability "rarely happens," and humanitarian agencies "often mis-diagnose the problem as lack of availability." These two handbooks come from the same network of authors, so their agreement is not independent confirmation, but it is the sector's reference position.

Before buying anything, your team therefore asks the three questions of seed security:

Availability: within a reasonable distance and before planting time, are there enough seeds of suitable crops?
Access: do families have the money or goods to buy or trade for them?
Quality: are the available seeds healthy, and of varieties farmers want?

If the answer to the first question is yes, the problem is access, and the right response is not to import seeds. The FAO handbook says so plainly: seed aid must work with the national seed system and not damage it through excessive imports.

Six possible responses¶

The FAO sorts responses by the problem they address.

Response	For which problem
Direct distribution of seeds and tools	real unavailability, lost harvest, long displacement
Local purchase, then distribution	localized shortage
Seed protection food ration	the family may eat its seeds
Credit to small grain traders	availability, where farmers buy at market
Vouchers or cash to farmers	access, where markets work
Seed fairs	access, often with vouchers

The fourth response comes closest to this book's rule. The FAO writes that small grain traders "provide a crucial source of seed for farmers, especially in emergencies": credit to these traders would let them source from farther away, in better varieties, and store more. Here again is the idea of restoring traders rather than replacing them.

The seed fair with vouchers¶

The principle is simple. Instead of free seeds, farmers receive vouchers that they exchange, at a fair organized for the occasion, for the seeds of their choice, sold by seed companies, local producers, and traders. The farmer chooses the crops, varieties, and quantities, and judges the quality; the money stays in the local economy.

In late 2000, in eastern Kenya, hit by successive droughts, CRS and its partners organized fourteen fairs in three weeks for more than 8,000 families, with 275 grain traders, over 75% of them women. Families got up to 14 kg of seed for an 8-dollar voucher, which would have bought only 4 kg of commercial maize seed. The agencies that had ordered commercial seed did not receive it in time to plant. These figures are reported by the organization that carried out the work, with no comparison group, and drought is not a sudden-onset disaster: take away the method more than the results.

The 2002 handbook sets out the safeguards:

watch prices: the organizer must step in if fair prices run more than 50% above those of the ordinary market;
serve everyone in one day: if the fair lasts two days, some recipients may resell the next day what they bought the day before;
register the sellers and explain to recipients what their voucher is worth;
start with a pilot fair, with few recipients.

Your club can fund a fair, observe it, bring in traders it knows; an agricultural partner runs it.

Planting dates are not negotiable¶

After Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, the FAO noted in May 2019 that seeds had to be in the ground "by end of April" to allow a possible winter harvest. In Nepal, the FAO's assessment of agricultural livelihoods, carried out one month after the 2015 earthquake, found that the rice planting window was almost closed, but that there was still time for millet and vegetables. The same assessment noted that farm input shops were gradually reopening, and drew the conclusion: this was the moment to use cash or vouchers.

In Dadu district, Pakistan, after the 2022 floods, an early recovery project by Save the Children and the national NGO National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) gave 40,000 rupees to each smallholder to buy seeds and tools and prepare the land, and 20,000 rupees to women for a kitchen garden. Average household income rose from 216,000 to 303,241 rupees, below the target of 336,000; the final evaluation, commissioned by the organization, attributes this to poor rainfall and new flooding. Cash delivered on time does not protect against a bad season.

Finally, the agriculture guide for recovery published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reports two lessons from Aceh after the 2004 tsunami, drawn from a study it cites. The seeds, fertilizer, equipment, and credit handed out had come too early, "because basic infrastructure was not yet ready to allow these inputs to be used." And the successful initiatives rested on firm commitments to buy the first year's harvest and help sell it: "The farmers' risks were thus underwritten." Before funding production, find out who will buy it.

Rebuild less, but better¶

The FAO learned this lesson on a large scale after the 2004 tsunami. Its Asia-Pacific office, after reviewing more than a hundred studies on Indonesia and Sri Lanka, wrote that fisheries suffered first from earlier overexploitation: rehabilitation "needs to focus not on the effects of the tsunami, but on addressing pre-existing trends." Chapter 5 told the rest: too many boats, badly built, sometimes given to people who were not fishers. Nine years later, after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the FAO made it one of its priorities to ensure that "pre-typhoon fishing capacity is not exceeded."

Shizugawa Bay: from over a thousand rafts to three hundred¶

In Shizugawa Bay, in Miyagi Prefecture, oysters have been farmed for more than a century. Before 2011, more than a thousand rafts were installed there, with, according to the body that now certifies the farm, often poor productivity and growth. The tsunami destroyed most of the installations; many oyster farmers left the trade.

Those who stayed, members of the local branch of the Miyagi fishing cooperative, joined a three-year pilot program, guided by WWF Japan and a government grant. They cut the number of rafts to 300, managed by 32 producers. Five years after the tsunami, the farm became the first in Japan certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC). The certifying body puts forward a figure for a sharp rise in income that this book does not repeat: it comes from the body itself, and no independent source confirms it. What to keep from its account is that the reduction was led by the producers themselves, organized in a cooperative.

Watari: strawberries a meter off the ground¶

Before the earthquake, the Miyagi Watari agricultural cooperative was the leading strawberry-producing area in Tohoku: 96 hectares, 380 farms, 3,600 metric tons sold. The tsunami hit 96% of the land.

By October 2011, abandoned plots inland had been found to replace the lost fields. Tunnel greenhouses went up on them with a national subsidy, and production resumed in November on 20% of the former area. In September 2013, 51 households moved into new greenhouse complexes, where the strawberry plants grow in troughs set about one meter off the ground and fed with a nutrient solution. In 2018, shipments exceeded the pre-earthquake level.

Seven years and several government subsidies: a club will not reproduce that scale. What it can take away is the method, a partial and fast restart on replacement land, which kept the producers in the business.

Rebuild as before	Rebuild better
replace every lost boat	do not exceed prior capacity, or the authorized boat type
restore the same plots	use the redevelopment to consolidate or enlarge
restart the same crop	diversify if the single crop lost everything
donors decide	organized producers decide

Cooperatives: a tool, not a proof¶

The Omoe cooperative did what no donor could have done: share scarce boats among fishers who knew one another, under an accepted rule. The Japanese cases show the cooperative in three roles:

organizer of sharing for scarce tools (Omoe);
temporary employer: the Ofunato fishing cooperative used public programs to hire its own members to clear the fishing grounds, which freed up the port and gave an income to fishers hit by the disaster;
owner of shared equipment too expensive for a single business (Kesennuma).

The Japanese Reconstruction Agency draws three lessons, which it phrases this way: "Implement fishing boat sharing to quickly resume fishing"; "Build on union connections to heighten member solidarity"; and, for small processors, organize "under a collaborative arrangement or by establishing a cooperative."

What the research does not say¶

A claim circulates: cooperatives are said to withstand disasters better. It usually rests on two reports from the International Labour Office (ILO), from 2009 and 2013. But these reports deal with the 2007-2008 financial crisis, not natural disasters. The research done for this book found no study showing that cooperatives withstand an earthquake or a flood better, and no study on auditing or recapitalizing savings and credit cooperatives damaged by a disaster. What we have are cases, mostly Japanese, in a wealthy country with a strong state.

The second of these reports does contain a warning, written for financial cooperatives, that also holds after a disaster: setting up primary cooperatives alone, without the structures that support them, "will just lead to problems that later on will be difficult to put right." The CED guide describes the same risk: the "shell" cooperative, registered with no democratic life or real activity, often created to capture grants.

Checking a damaged cooperative¶

A cooperative that existed before may have lost members, stock, premises, cash. Before putting money into it, your club visits and checks what a model accounting manual for Ugandan savings and credit cooperatives expects of a well-governed cooperative: a general assembly that approves the budget and appoints the auditor, two signatories on every account, a register of members, a reserve fund, grants kept separate from members' shares, the latest audit and, for a savings and credit cooperative, the list of overdue loans.

Add two questions specific to the post-disaster period: how many members are still there and active, and what is left of the cash and stock? A cooperative that has lost half its members no longer stands on the same base. And read its results without the grants: a surplus that comes mainly from aid means it cannot yet stand on its own.

What the Rotary Foundation funds, and what it refuses¶

If your project goes through a global grant (Chapter 10), two current rules bear directly on this chapter.

What is possible. The global grant terms and conditions in force in July 2026 allow a project to include building infrastructure such as "storage units, fences and security systems, water or irrigation systems, or greenhouses." That is the kind of link a farm chain loses. A project that uses groundwater must include a hydrogeological study, which the grant budget can pay for.

What is refused. As Chapter 5 noted, the Foundation's community economic development guidelines (April 2024) make ineligible any project that only donates equipment. The area of focus policy statement, of the same date, also excludes infrastructure or equipment projects with no direct economic result or with no operation and maintenance plan.

In other words, a project that comes down to handing out boats or seeds will not pass. A project that funds an existing cooperative's warehouse, with its rules of use, training, and an identified buyer, can. Check every point in the documents in force at the time of your application; Appendix E shows where to find them.

What the club does¶

Your club is not a buyer, a seed company, or a cooperative. It facilitates: it knows the traders, transporters, and bankers of its area, and knows how to bring them together.

Step	What the club does	With whom
Choose one or two sectors	based on the Chapter 3 assessment	farmer members, traders
Map the chain	one link per row, before and now	cooperative, collectors, farm service
Find the broken link	name it, with its former holder	traders, buyers
Check access before availability	the three seed questions	extension, grain traders
Choose the response	voucher, local order, trader credit, shared equipment	farm partner, local lender
Identify the buyer	before funding production	buyers, processors
Work through the existing cooperative	after checking its accounts	cooperative, authorities
Keep to the calendar	planting date or season	producers

Three roles suit a club of business owners especially well.

Connect the buyer and the producers. The successful initiatives in Aceh guaranteed that the harvest would be bought. Your club can find that buyer among its members or in its network: a processor, a distributor, a school cafeteria, a local government. It does not become the buyer; it helps negotiate who carries which risk.

Fund shared equipment, for an organization that exists. A cold room, a dryer, a warehouse, a shared boat: for an existing cooperative or producer group, with written sharing rules, as in Omoe or Kesennuma.

Order from local traders. When buying goods is justified, place the order with the regional wholesaler, as in the example of the hoes and wheelbarrows in Chapter 5: your members know these suppliers.

Two precautions apply to all of these actions. Do not pay people to attend training: the MERS advise against attendance allowances. And if you ask recipients for a contribution, follow Chapter 5, which points out that a global grant forbids collecting funds from them.

The pitfalls¶

Pitfall	Why it happens	Remedy
Handing out seeds from elsewhere	access is confused with availability	ask the three questions; vouchers at local traders
Arriving after planting time	the project follows its own calendar	align the project with the crop calendar
Replacing more boats than there were	each donor counts its own gifts	ask fisheries services or the cooperative for the prior number
Funding production with no buyer	thinking production, not sales	identify the buyer before any funding
Creating a cooperative to receive aid	funders ask for a structure	work with an organization that already existed
Presenting cooperatives as proven resilient	an ILO study is miscited	say the post-disaster proof does not exist
Helping a business that lives on aid	the relief boom looks lasting	check it will survive the humanitarians leaving

One last pitfall is the numbers. The results published for seed fairs, FAO distributions, or the Japanese cases are almost always reported by those who carried out the work, with no comparison group. Do not promise your donors more, and plan your own measurement from the start (Chapter 13).

What your club now has in hand¶

At the end of this work, your club has the "markets" section of its recovery file: the chain or chains selected, the broken link and the actor who held it, the chosen response, the identified buyer, the cooperative or producer group that will carry the action, and the date the season imposes.

The Omoe fishers did not get new boats in May 2011. They got a sharing rule, a cooperative that enforced it, and the wakame season. What remains are the places where things are sold: the street, the market hall, the marketplace, without which no chain reaches the customer. That is the subject of the next chapter.