Shackled Orange: Biofortified Varieties in the Sweetpotato Commodity Chain in Mozambique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biofortified, orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) varieties are being promoted as a part of a strategy to reduce Vitamin A Deficiency among rural and urban populations in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses the commodity chain approach to understand whether markets may stimulate or not the production of the new orange sweetpotato varieties on Mozambique’s main consumer market, Maputo, its capital and largest city. It shows that the chain linking rural producers to the city’s consumers is operated by private actors; the government provides basic infrastructures and price information. International donors are involved through the dissemination of planting material and nutrition information in support the marketing of OFSP. The commodity chains of white and orange-fleshed varieties are entwined with no clear price differences. The annual marketed volume is estimated at 8,000 tonnes, mostly produced by smallholders and sold to consumers by sidewalk and open-air market retailers. This market segment is dominated by women. A small group of specialized - male and female - commercial OFSP producers supplies about 0.5% to 1% of this market selling directly to a specific group of clients who either buy at farm gate or through home delivery. The conclusion is that the existing commodity chain fails to stimulate the production of OFSP and the expansion of its benefits to wider sections of the population suggesting that the emphasis should be on having biofortified varieties that can compete successfully with the conventional ones at the farm-level.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".