ASAIL integrates a business development services (BDS) and value chain approach to develop Lebanon’s two primary agro-food sub-sectors, identified based on a rigorous assessment of market potential, economic impact and geographical overlap. These sub-sectors are:  

1.     Traditional Lebanese specialty foods - including ready-to-eat fruit and vegetable based products, sweets and baked goods, honey, distillates, essential oils, etc. 

2.     Small ruminant-goat and sheep-dairy products

ASAIL seeks to raise the efficiency of input, production, processing and marketing businesses in these two sub sectors and encourages business linkages between Northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and Southern Lebanon.  The value chain approach works with stakeholders throughout the product’s path from farm to market shelf and seeks to identify and address constraints to growth and sustainability, increase transactional efficiencies to maximize returns, and nurture new opportunities that benefit the smallholder.  Driving activities is ASAIL’s long term vision of a competitive Lebanese agro-food industry and expanded economic opportunities for rural producers, cooperatives and small and medium enterprises.

The project’s core activities include:

1.     Market and Consumer Analysis

2.     Increasing Efficiency at Critical Points in the Value Chain

§  Producer Group Organization and SME Access to Markets and Services

§  Improving Productivity through Extension covering agricultural , animal health, quality and quantity,  

§  Producer -Processor Linkages

§  Upgrading Processing Facilities and Practices

3.     Strengthening the Delivery of Effective Industry Services through Private Sector Service Providers

4.     Developing New Export and Domestic Markets for Quality Products

5.     Establishing Sustainable Mechanisms for Product Development, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Agro-Food Industry

6.     Facilitating Financial Services Linkages and Diversifying Loan Products Available to Rural Producers and SMEs