Value Stream Analysis of Vegetable Supply Chain in Bangladesh: A Case Study

Abstract

Bangladesh is primarily an agricultural country. Agriculture plays a vital role in its economy in terms of food safety, value addition, export earnings and employment. Bangladesh weather and soils are suitable for a variety of harvests cultivation. More than 100 vegetables are produced in this country. Various types of vegetables are grown in rural Bangladesh in small homesteads and large agricultural land both for the own consumption and commercial purpose. Commercial vegetable trading has an integrated supply chain system which depends on some intermediaries and their activities to take the vegetables from producers to consumers. The main problem is consumer pays two to three times more than the producers' margin. The main objectives of this paper are to investigate the existing vegetable supply chain through value stream analysis and to identify different stakeholders and their activities, and also to illustrate various cost and price movement towards different stages of the supply chain. Based on the questionnaire different data are collected from farmers, different market actors, and consumer and finally problems regarding vegetable value chain are identified. In the existing situation, producers have no control over the vegetable supply chain, product pricing; rather they are strongly influenced by market syndicates. In order to make the problems of the existing supply chain network more understandable different analysis is conducted in this paper. Finally a new network is proposed to the vegetable supply chain.