My Dad used to work for IDRC (www.idrc.ca) and he told me a story about one of his earliest (and happiest) development projects. It's very simple: broadcast actual market price information over radio to farmers in remote rural African areas. In this way, the farmers had enough information to tell the middle man to stuff it when they were offered extremely low (< 1%) of market value for their food. Their wages increased ~10x over the next season.
tl;dr: information symmetry is good for the end of the chains (initial producers, end consumers)
That's a pretty cool program that's evolved with other NGO's using SMS messages to cell phones. The proliferation of mobiles and utility of cheap cell phones has been a massive boost to productivity in rural areas. One of the key market barriers continues to be consistent logistics given the shelf life of agricultural products which means some of these middlemen still have a significant upper hand.
tl;dr: information symmetry is good for the end of the chains (initial producers, end consumers)