Indigenous crops remain marginal within formal food markets and national agricultural transformation strategies despite their recognized contributions to climate resilience, nutrition, and livelihood diversification. This study examines how indigenous crop outcomes are shaped by the interaction between household capabilities, value chain functionality, market demand signals, and institutional policy visibility. Using harmonized cross-sectional data from 1,305 households across six regions of Tanzania Dar es Salaam, Pwani, Morogoro, Dodoma, Iringa, and Njombe collected under the Food Systems Research Network for Africa (FSNet-Africa) and Indigenous Food Transformation (IFT) programs between 2023 and 2024, the analysis integrates micro-level production and processing behavior with meso-level market participation patterns and macro-level trade and policy dynamics. The findings indicate that household decision-making strongly influences engagement in indigenous crop production and marketing activities, with women playing a central role in processing and informal market participation. However, value addition remains constrained not by technical capacity but by weak market incentives, limited aggregation systems, and inconsistent demand signals. Indigenous knowledge related to crop production and utilization is predominantly concentrated among older cohorts, raising concerns regarding intergenerational knowledge transfer and long-term sustainability. Trade and policy assessments further reveal that despite widespread household engagement in indigenous crop production, these crops remain weakly represented in formal markets and receive limited prioritization within national agricultural and trade policy frameworks. Taken together, the results suggest that the continued marginalization of indigenous crops within transforming food systems is driven less by supply-side limitations than by systemic misalignment between household production incentives, value chain coordination mechanisms, market signals, and policy support instruments. The study contributes empirical insights linking micro-level behavioral responses to macro-level institutional and market dynamics, highlighting the need for coordinated interventions that strengthen processing infrastructure, market incentives, and policy visibility to support the integration of indigenous crops into climate-resilient and inclusive food system transformation pathways.

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), indigenous wild fruits (WF) have become a niche and emerging market, driven by their potential for local value addition and the growing awareness among urban consumers of their nutritional and health benefits as superfoods. Global demand for WF products is also rising, creating new opportunities for commercialization and value chain development. Yet, knowledge remains limited about the market barriers and opportunities for building sustainable WF value chains, the key actors involved, and the emerging sustainability concerns among stakeholders. Using tamarind in Zambia as a case study, this study explores the potentials and constraints for developing a sustainable value chain around an emerging WF in SSA. Qualitative data from key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and visual network mapping were analyzed through content and social network analysis. The findings reveal two distinct value chains: traditional and modern. The traditional chain is long, market-driven, and involves mostly small-scale actors targeting rural and peri-urban consumers. The modern chain is shorter, managed through both market and relational contracts, and composed mainly of small and medium enterprises serving urban markets. Although expansion opportunities exist, the sector remains fragmented and poorly coordinated. Actors face multiple constraints, including weak entrepreneurial skills, limited market information, poor harvesting methods, frequent human-wildlife conflicts, and low access to finance and technology. Sustainability concerns also persist. Harvesters highlight economic and social issues such as exploitative labor and unsafe working conditions, while experts and stakeholders emphasize environmental challenges, including unsustainable harvesting, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss. These findings point to the need for upgrading processes, products, and functions along the tamarind value chain to enhance its sustainability and inclusiveness.

Although baobab has emerged as a commercially promising indigenous crop with expanding domestic and export demand, limited evidence exists on how efficiently value chain actors convert resources into marketable outputs and whether performance varies systematically across actors and along the efficiency distribution. Understanding these patterns is critical for identifying resource misallocation and designing effective upgrading strategies. Using a sample size of 871 value chain actors, this study estimates technical efficiency among baobab processors, retailers, and traders using a double-bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework and examines heterogeneity in efficiency drivers through quantile regression. The double-bootstrap procedure corrects bias in efficiency estimates and enables consistent inference. The results reveal substantial efficiency disparities both across actor categories and within performance tiers. Among processors, business training, market awareness, and formal registration significantly enhance efficiency, while greater processing experience is associated with marginally lower efficiency. Distributional analysis shows that these gains are strongest among lower-performing processors. For retailers, training consistently improves efficiency, whereas education, gender, and distance to markets exert heterogeneous effects across quantiles. Among traders, efficiency is strongly associated with network size, baobab-derived income, and trading volume, with stronger effects at the median and upper quantiles. These findings highlight actor-specific and distribution-sensitive constraints shaping upscaling in indigenous crop value chains.

Abstrac

Saffron is a unique indigenous crop of Iran and, while a relatively high value export, contributes significantly to the economy and is a critical crop for climate-resilient agriculture in the arid and semi-arid regions of Iran. Although Iran is the world's largest saffron producer and exporter, the majority of its saffron is exported in bulk, and as a result, Iran is unable to capture value from processing, and it also presents a challenge to the long-term viability of the industry.

Research Question:

This study seeks to explain the strategic strengthening of the Iranian saffron value chain within the existing domestic value addition, competitiveness and resilience in the context of climate and market uncertainty.

Methodology:

This study utilizes a qualitative SWOT approach using secondary data, reports, and previous empirical research on the production and marketing of saffron and the governance of the supply chain. The internal and external factors concerning the production, processing, marketing and export of the value chain were identified and analyzed in order to formulate strategic directions.

Findings

Strengths include saffron’s high value density, drought tolerance, adaptability to smallholders, and strong international reputation. Major weaknesses include fragmented production systems, poor coordination at institutional levels, weak processing and branding, inconsistent quality control, and poor systems of traceability. The global demand for organic, functional, and traceable products is an opportunity. With increasing control and varying demand, competition from emerging producing nations is a growing threat. The diversification into high-value derivatives such as extracts, nutraceuticals, and certified organic geographical indication labels is a growing opportunity.

The overall analysis suggests that important strategies to enhance value chain performance and sustain production include improved systems of traceability and certification, integrated branding and processing in developing value chains, and the integration of saffron into the climate-resilient rural development of the country.