The question motivating this book is whether there are feasible and sustainable strategies capable of adding value to the agricultural income of small-scale producers. To this end, Sylvia Saes discusses four different theoretical approaches to how firms can create and capture value, with the aim of presenting a model for the analysis of differentiation in the rural sector. The author develops the idea that value creation and appropriation must be jointly determined, since the consistency of the differentiation strategy relies not only on the characteristics of the sources of value, but also on the relationships between the segments of the supply chain. This analysis is illustrated by cases of differentiation in the Brazilian coffee market. The theoretical content of this work was developed while the author was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization (CBS) at the Copenhagen Business School.
A research work at an advanced academic level was developed and gave rise to the book aimed at the wider public. That was a fortuitous decision, because the work interests different audiences. Both policy formulators and decision makers involved with private strategies face the issue of the survival of small-scale agriculture. Agribusiness, often seen as an issue relating only to so-called big agriculture, gains a broader context in this book. 
From the preface.