Rapid Market Appraisal
Rapid market appraisal (RMA) is a fast, low-cost, interdisciplinary field method for diagnosing how agricultural markets and value chains perform and where their binding constraints lie. Rooted in the rapid-reconnaissance marketing tradition associated with John Holtzman and codified for value chains in FAO's 2007 guidelines by Carlos da Silva and Hildo de Souza Filho, RMA trades the comprehensiveness of a formal survey for speed and flexibility: a small team scopes the commodity system, mines existing data to form hypotheses about constraints, and then conducts iterative semi-structured interviews with actors all along the chain — producers, traders, processors, transporters, retailers, and support services — refining its understanding as it goes and triangulating across sources. The product is a timely, actionable diagnosis of market structure, conduct, and performance that can guide investment, policy, or project design when a slow census-style study is neither affordable nor warranted.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- da Silva, C. A., & de Souza Filho, H. M. (2007). Guidelines for Rapid Appraisals of Agrifood Chain Performance in Developing Countries. Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 20. Rome: FAO. · URL
- Collinson, M. P. (Ed.) (2000). A History of Farming Systems Research. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing & FAO. · ISBN 9780851994055
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.