Tree tomato entrepreneur Mr Mairuri

A mantra in the agricultural development community has it that middlemen are bad. Yes, of course not all of them, but in general they exploit poor farmers and take most of the profit, or so the mantra goes. You mostly see people nod when this comes up, as recently in presentations at the Crops for the Future Symposium in Kuala Lumpur, where the middlemen took again much blame for dysfunctional value chains of neglected crops. It sounds so obvious and plausible, but is it? Not quite. Much literature identifies middlemen as essential in agricultural value chains, especially where competition amongst themselves adds efficiency to their own chain segment and thus competitiveness to the whole chain. Yet, the disgraceful meme of the exploitative middleman continues to infest minds against all evidence.

This is why we enjoyed reading about Mr Muiruri, who sources tree tomatoes from Luigi’s mother-in-law. Clearly, this entrepreneurial gentleman, who provides seeds and advice to his “contract growers” is key to the tree tomato value chain. He ensures the sustainability of his supply by spreading out production risks to a variety of growers, a perfectly legitimate strategy. And by sourcing from dispersed production sites, he -unconsciously?- avoids pathogen build-up in this notoriously disease-prone crop. How many more Mr Mairuri need to be showcased for the middlemen myth to go away?