Established in 2017 as an agricultural development project, Agridev is now a major consultancy firm in the agricultural and agro-food field, providing services such as needs assessments, project management, capacity building, and product development.
Agridev has a large network of private, non-profit, and governmental partners. It empowers local actors to fulfill their role in agricultural and rural development while supporting the agricultural value chain, helping the local communities and encouraging farmers to plant and sell their products.
Agridev constantly works on enhancing the value chain and supporting farmers to increase their agricultural knowledge and maintain sustainable supply levels with fewer risks, creating windows for scalability, helping women increase awareness towards innovative agricultural choices and item selection, etc.
In-House Production Of Sundried Tomatoes
Agridev’s proposed project under the Food System Challenge is the in-house production of sun-dried tomatoes.
The tomato value chain in Northeast Baalbeck is currently facing tremendous challenges limiting the efficiency of production and the capacity of the producers to sustain cultivation under the current multi-dimensional crisis context.
In fact, in 2021, a large number of tomato farmers stopped irrigation and saw the majority of their crops fail. This is due to harsh living conditions, galloping poverty, a stiff liquidity strain in foreign currency terms, and stiff markets.
On the downstream side, the value of industrial tomato products has plummeted lately due to the harsh competition of tomato paste products, which represent the main output for industrially produced tomatoes, coming in from neighboring countries.
The impact of this project on the rural community is considerable: it will incorporate farmers and their families into the production chain by buying their crops and involving them fully in the sun-drying process, since the workforce dedicated to this task will be done by village women, residing around the processing sites.
The Food System Challenge
The Food System Challenge is implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP) and Berytech through support from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The program’s main outcomes are enhanced food security, a well-functioning local food system, enhanced efficiency and resilience of cooperatives and SMEs working across different streams of the food systems, and to increased employment opportunities, especially for women and vulnerable individuals.
