Between 4 and 22 October 2004, the project hosted an electronic conference, based around the Phase 1 country scoping papers, regional overviews, and global issues papers (available from this site's resources pages).

The electronic conference tackled the following questions:

- To what extent is market access and market entry for small-mid scale producers being affected by changes in domestic food retailing and processing?
- How can small producers get better entry to commercial agrifood chains?
- Do traditional marketing chains confer greater benefits for livelihoods and poverty reduction? How can these markets respond to the challenge of supermarkets?
- What are the research gaps?

Summaries of the discussions are available here.

The complete discussion can be viewed here.