Symposium abstract accepted

“Beekeeping Commercialisation – The Process Flow Harnessing Carbon Credits Finance”

Key words

Value chain, business model, quality, capital, commercial, investment.

Background / purpose

Developing apiculture businesses and wider forest-based economies needs capital. The greater the scale and impact being sort, the more capital is needed.

Organic investment capital generation by subsistence farmers is not a viable as it is precarious and low level.

Debt is expensive as it carries high-cost interest and sector risk premiums.

Problem description

Problem 1. The value chain of apiculture is not well described or contextualised therefore not commercially explainable to investors.

Problem 2. Low investment capital suppresses the sector’s development meaning it is off mainstream investment landscapes.

Problem 3. Many stakeholders remain at the subsistence level, despite being skilled, as they cannot access and then leverage capital. This supresses their security, ability to improve processes, and quality.

Problem 4. Inter-relationships between apiculture and wider forest-based economies are not well commercially described so current values are depressed and potential values opaque.

Methodology

Through workshops, site visits, interviews, and desk research, an integrated process and value flow design was developed with three components.

Apiculture Value Chain.

A developed, expanded diagram using the well-established Porter’s Value Chain to describe the primary and support functions covering; actions and how they are linked, where capital is deployed, and how value is created and consumed in a commercial apiculture business model.

Business Model Robustness checklist.

A simple checklist covering five areas that question business model dependencies and complexities that create and / or disperse viability, sustainability, and scalability risks.  

Process and Quality Philosophy.

An adapted version of the high-level Toyota Way model to champion “people” and “continuous improvement”. A “well begun is half done” mindset.

Results and conclusions

All three components are developed and critiqued but not deployed on a live case.

All three could be trained from at this stage and applied to existing apiculture value chains.

Action research opportunities are sought.

Practical implications

• Better apiculture business model design and outcomes.
• Reduced risk for participants.
• Increased investor interest means better, lower cost capital including micro-capital.
• Wider scale investment opportunities including carbon credits to increase the value of forest-based economies.