From farm to table
Students take one everyday food and follow it backwards — from the plate to the field, naming every person it passed through and every cost nobody printed on the packet. With a small group, do it with a single food. One food traced properly beats three done fast.
How it runs
The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.
-
01
Write the Value Chain Actor cards and the Hidden Price Tag cards beforehand, following the samples at the end of this activity. Handwritten is fine. -
02
Sort them by food. Potato cards in the envelope marked potato, corn cards in the one marked corn. A mixed envelope ruins the exercise. -
03
Put each food and its envelope into its own bag, and keep the bags shut until you hand them over. -
04
Breaking down a value chain. Keep this part short; the group work is where the session lives. Start here: a packaged food is built so you cannot see past the packet. You know the brand. You do not know the field, the district, the wage, or who took which share of the price. -
05
Give the class the term in one line. A value chain is every person and every step between the field and your hand, and every point where the price changes. The reason for tracing it is not the packet. It is finding out who is carrying the costs nobody prints. -
06
Hold up the packet of chips in one hand and the loose potatoes in the other. Same vegetable. One costs far more than the other. Ask the class to name every person standing between the field and that packet, and to say where the difference went. -
07
Write the answers on the board as they come. Without much prompting a class usually gets most of this list: -
08
The farmer who grew the potato, and everybody who worked that field -
09
The trader and the mandi, where the price gets set — and the farmer is usually not the one setting it -
10
The truck, the diesel, the cold store -
11
The factory that turned a potato into a chip, the oil it was fried in, the foil it was sealed in -
12
The distributor, the kirana or the supermarket, the advertisement — and you -
13
Two things a class nearly always misses, so say them out loud. The farmer pays before anybody pays the farmer: seed, fertiliser, pesticide, diesel, water, labour, and often interest on the loan that bought all of it. And the price on the packet was decided by the last person in the chain, not the first. -
14
Finding the hidden costs. Split the class into small groups. Each group gets one bag, chart paper and tape. -
15
Each group opens its envelope, works through the actors and the hidden costs one at a time, and tapes the cards to the chart paper, with each hidden cost placed under the actor who causes it or carries it. A group that cannot agree where a card belongs should tape it between the two and be ready to say why. -
16
Groups then put their charts on the wall and read each other's. By the end the wall is a row of value chains with their price tags showing, which is the exact opposite of what a packet is designed to do. -
17
Here are the actors, and the hidden costs that belong underneath each of them:
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
- Which of these hidden costs does somebody actually pay, and which get handed to the soil, the groundwater, or whoever is farming here next?
- Who wins in this chain and who loses? Point at the cards on the wall, not at ideas.
- Where is the farmer on your chart, and how much of the packet price stopped there? Nobody in this room knows. That is worth sitting with.
- The loose potato has a value chain too, and it is shorter. Is shorter always better — for the eater, for the farmer, and for the vendor with the thela?
The sample cards are written for corn. Rewrite them for a food your students actually eat: potato, tomato, onion, wheat, milk, tea. A card naming your own mandi does more work than one naming a supply chain on another continent.
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
https://grassrootsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Food-Sovereignty_Module1_Final. pdf
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.