High Value Agricultural Products

High Value Agricultural Products- (HVAPs)

A generally agreed definition of HVAP is "a crop, fish, llivestock or non-timner forest product that returns a higher gross margin per unit of avilable resources (land, labour, capital, human capacities) than other products within a given location and context". (Source: GFAR, 2005, Synthesis Report, International Workshop on "How can the poor benefit from the growing markets for high value agricultural products", Columbia).

Typically, high value agricultural products may have higher value-to weight ratios than high volume commodities. They are often associated with higher investment and risk options than field crops and they are generally supported by more intensive production systems in terms of alnd area and labor requirements.

High Value Agricultural Products are often differentiated from lower value goods due to their perishability, scarcity, historical and cultural significance and/or difficulty in either production or delivery to market.

Higher returns are achieved because these products possess attributes for which the consumers are willing to pay premiun prices, such as the content of a particular substance (e.g stimulanst, aromatics, medicinal properties, micro-nutrients, vitamins, anti-oxidanst, etc). More recently, for many producers and consumers the understanding of "high value" has broadened or blurred to include products that are special, rare, that provide mystery are considered exotic and in some cases suggest risk

Given these characteristics, high value agricultural products typically include goods such as:

• meat and dairy products,
• horticultural crops,
• fish
• medicinal products,
• stimulants,
• spices,
• cosmetic,
• marital and religions products,
• fresh and processed goods

Producers can also achieve higher value through "differentiated" products, which can be achieved by product development processes that enable one product to have many price-quality variations.

Similarly, segmenting consumers also enable for value addition as can shifting sales points to include high value markets.