Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
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Further advances in ICT are also opening up new opportunities for 2GMIS platforms to include,
for example, directly facilitating trade. A well-cited example in Africa is ESOKO, which is
trailblazer in West Africa and RATIN in Eastern Africa. These platforms attempt to connect
buyers and sellers. However, the considerable investments which have gone into this have borne
little on or fruit because they lack systems which guarantee delivery of offered stocks and/or
payment by successful bidders. The emergence of market institutions such as WRS and
commodity exchanges will optimise the potential to exploit the structured trading opportunities
which are created. In addition, some private platforms are setting farmers’ database and
deploying remote sensing technology in order to monitor the on-farm performance of crops.
This is particularly interesting to lenders. However, evidence from countries such as South
Africa suggests that scaling up such platforms will be significantly boosted if the development
of MIS is tied to the promotion of complementary market institutions. The evidence also shows
that most MIS in developing countries face challenges in terms of sustainability and providers
remain dependent on donors for support.
Evidence from Onli e Survey of MISThough the response rate to the online survey was rather low, about 10% of the target
respondents, the evidence which emerged confirmed observations from the literature review,
including mapping of MIS in developing countries. It is quite clear that the advance to 2GMIS
models has broadened the range of crops and livestock covered; diversified service providers to
include not only governments as was the case with 1GMIS but also provision by private sector
players and NGOs. It is evident, however, adopting ICT has not addressed some of the challenges
which have stymied uptake of information services by market players (especially farmers and
traders). Improving the content of the information provided is one of the areas which emerged
as critical from the online survey. This should include aligning price information to
opportunities for producers and traders to sell into formal market segments where trade is set
around standardised weights and quality. It is apparent that respondents are not strongly
advocating regulatory framework for MIS but rather policy actions which foster the
development of formal structured trading systems.
8.2 EVIDENCE AND LESSONS FROM CASES FROM OIC MEMBER
COUNTRIES The three countries selected for the case studies were Egypt, Indonesia and Uganda. The MIS
landscape in Egypt is dominated by government-based providers. Though are initiatives by the
private sector and non-government organisations to set up MIS, these are at rather early stages
of development. Hence, as was noted in a study by Christiansen et al. (2011) over six years ago,
smallholder farmers continue to be held back by limited access to reliable market information.
The situation is partly attributed to government control of markets for strategic commodities
such as wheat, where it dominates domestic procurement and imports and therefore
determines. The ripple effects of this dominance are reported to affect other subsectors such as
tomato, where opportunities exist for producers to adopt production and marketing strategies
which ease entry into the large and lucrative European Union market. There is no evidence from
Egypt to suggest that the existing MIS are linked to initiatives to promote the development of
market institutions such as WRS and commodity exchanges or even to sustainable agricultural
credit delivery system.