Agricultural value chains activity in uzbekistan

Agricultural production 
On the production chain level there are obstacles connected with seeds and seedling distribution markets, 
which are often based on information and connections to the networks of public and private distributors. 
Women farmers contested that they ask for the help of their male relatives or acquaintances in order to 
obtain good seedlings. 
For women doing small scale farming as well as gardening at home pruning has been one of the activities 
which gave them more ownership and confidence over their farming businesses. However, there are still 
various techniques of orchard management, water management, planting, trellising, grafting, pest and 

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13 | AVC UZBEKISTAN FY2019 QUARTER 3 REPORT
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disease control, fertilizer application, and pruning, in which women still have a gap in knowledge and skills. 
The proposals that came from several women expressed the necessity for trainings and also training 
materials such as video-taped courses related to pruning. 
Several advanced female farmers expressed the difficulty in access to information and resources for 
further expansion of their farming businesses. Cultural context and the role of women as caretakers 
very often result in lack of access to information, production as well as postharvest and sales networks. 
It is worthwhile to note that t majority of such production, harvest, post-harvest universal and specialized 
support teams consist of women who are involved in these seasonal wage works. 
Certainly female teams performing various agricultural services within production, harvesting and post- 
harvesting stages can be considered as one of the important elements in the value chains. Teams of 
multiple activity workers such as: land preparations, cleaning, planting seedlings, weeding, tilling fertilizing 
and also pruning, are seasonally employed, however, farmers very often complain about 
unprofessionalism of some of the teams. This raises a need to prepare professional teams which could 
be developed into business models of agro service teams. The same types of groups and also specifically 
specialized ones were found in harvesting and post-harvesting chain. However, another important fact 
noted is that not all the provinces have such skilled teams. A women farmer/exporter from Bukhara 
province contested that she has to bring female teams of pickers and packers from Samarkand province 
as they are skilled and professional in their job. A consolidator from Namangan informed about his 
experience of not finding skilled people and teams in Surkhandarya, whom he could entrust for picking, 
sorting, grading and packing fruits. This consolidator had to bring over experienced teams from Ferghana 
province. In this regards, multiplications of skilled and professional female teams specialized especially 
in harvesting and post-harvesting activities could create an important niche for further institutionalization 
of such agricultural business services. 
As it was mentioned earlier, the result from stakeholders’ and AVC technical staff discussions revealed 
high presence of women in production and post-harvest chains of fruits, vegetables and grapes and 
domination of men in consolidation, storage, whole sales in local markets and exports. Although women’s 
absence in some of these categories have cultural specifics for women, nevertheless, there are many 
opportunities for women to move up the value chain ladder and receive higher incomes. 
One of the strategies of the AVC project should foster equitable participation of men and women in 
trainings on post-harvest, marketing and sales activities of their produce as well as improve access to 
information on local and international buyers and markets. Specific trainings on storage and processing 
technologies, GAP and Bio standards or fair trade production and marketing could promote future 
development opportunities especially for women producers and consolidators.