What are critical gender issues and trade-offs in participation in specific livestock and fish value chains? What are the key gender research questions that this program should focus on both within specific value chains and across all the livestock and fish value chains?
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CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish 
Migration from rural areas to urban centers added heavy load to women this value chain R&D program should focus on this issues.
Even when there are few women involved in livestock and fishery activities,we would ask for types of women and men participating in the value chain. Why some of them participate and other do not? In my opinion to understand differences between women as a group as well as differences between men is necessary in order to define more appropriated strategies oriented to improve gender equity.
Fish culture is fast developing in Nigeria but poor fish marketing which is mainly controlled by women is a big issue. Difficulty encountered in fish sales and low pricing by the women fish mongers is a big discouragement. Research on creating efficient and easy marketing channels for farmed fish products will increase farmers’ productivity and boost fish farming especially for poor communities.
Participating in the value chain is difficult. Especially for small-scale aquaculturists to be part of an export chain is very difficult given the strict standards required. For women and men who do not have enough capital to invest and enough technical knowledge, it is not possible to be part of the value chain for export. If we want to promote value chain for export, we might be cutting off the small fish farmers.
I think we need to be very careful not to assume that women and men are NOT in competition. Often women open up or explore an underutilized resource, or a project encourages women to develop a resource and then as soon as it becomes profitable the men move in. Nor can we assume that those men will share their income or benefits with their families.
And I agree with Kyoko Kusakabe. Without the large scale and technical resources small scale producers, especially women, will be limited to local markets and to allowing most value to be extracted outside coastal communities.