COLEAD will support the value chain's action plan for 24 months, under the World Bank-funded FSRP project.
Cowpea, known in the trade as black-eyed beans, holds a particular place in Madagascar's dry grain exports: a largely smallholder value chain, serving markets that require increasingly well-documented food safety management. Official checks at the European Union border have, in recent years, revealed recurrent non-compliances on dry beans, pesticide residues such as chlorpyrifos in particular. The European Commission consequently increased the frequency of identity checks and physical checks applying to certain consignments, through Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/286 amending Regulation (EU) 2019/1793.
These requirements are not specific to Europe, nor are they only about the quality of the grain itself: they concern a value chain's ability to demonstrate what it does, from the choice of inputs through to shipment. That is what the value chain's updated action plan sets out to build.
A two-year mandate
The Ministry of Agriculture, through the management unit of the Food Systems Resilience Project (FSRP) in Madagascar, has entrusted COLEAD with supporting the implementation of that plan and aligning the value chain with international standards. FSRP is funded by the World Bank, with a total budget of USD 228.1 million over seven years, and this activity falls under its sub-component on strengthening priority value chains and links to regional markets.
The assignment runs for 24 months, timed to cover two recession-farming seasons on baiboho land.
Three strands of work
The first concerns governance and traceability: equipping the value chain with a working digital traceability system, a digital register of operators and the regulatory texts that frame it, and reviving the inter-regional dry grains platform as a space for monitoring and consultation.
The second addresses practices and controls. A sanitary and phytosanitary good practice guide specific to cowpea, together with a list of prohibited products, will serve as a common reference. A training-of-trainers session will precede the sessions rolled out to producers over the two seasons. Officers of the Plant Protection Directorate will be trained, 24 phytosanitary brigades trained and equipped, and an awareness campaign will target input retailers with a focus on fraud — a decisive link in the chain, since part of the residue problem originates there.
The third prepares what comes after. A regional monitoring and evaluation committee, bringing together the Plant Protection Directorate, the regional agriculture directorates and the platform's constituent groups, will track the indicators. An export marketing strategy will be developed and tested through pilot campaigns, ahead of arrangements to sustain the work beyond the project.
Where, and for whom
The situational review will cover all producing regions, with particular attention to Boeny and Betsiboka, where two pilot zones for the traceability system will be set up. The pilot phase is designed to reach 500 producers, 4 exporters, 12 collectors and 6 transporters, for 500 direct and as many indirect beneficiaries, and to transfer at least five technologies to value chain operators.
The objective comes down to one sentence: that compliance of Malagasy cowpea should no longer depend on the luck of the draw at inspection, but on a system that produces it.