Compétitivité des filières et rôle des intermédiaires : Commercialisation de la production paysanne de caoutchouc naturel

The natural rubber market displays a gap between the consumer industries (mostly heavy industries using sophisticated technology) and the producers (mostly smallholders). The majority of smallholders rely on a network of middlemen for marketing their output on the world market, while large estates seem to have economies of scale at the marketing stage. After a brief presentation of the competition factors on the world rubber market, this papers presents the marketing network of Indonesian smallholder rubber, thus explaining how middlemen networks are able to contribute to the competitiveness of the smallholder industry.