Improving Agricultural Market Performance:

Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems

ICT contributed to the evolution, in particular, it made it possible to transition from the

publication of price information through national radio, television and newspapers to the more

cost-effective vehicles of websites, emails and mobile telephony. ICT also made it possible to

undertake and report on trend analysis and present in more user-friendly formats than the long

price lists which were reported under the 1GMIS.

Though the improvements in MIS have been beneficial, especially for governments in terms of

policy actions and plans to manage food security, the anticipated benefits to private sector

stakeholders, especially farmers and traders, appears to be less tangible. This is attributable, in

part, the focus of most MIS continues to be on collecting and disseminating price information,

with little or no investment in trend analysis. Other identified gaps in the information provided

include lack of output forecasts and stock monitoring data which are critical in assessing the

supply situation and projecting future prices. This information is particularly important when

market actors have to decide on delaying the sale of commodities or where lenders are

evaluating the request to finance inventories which are to be sold or used at a future date.

The online survey was undertaken as part of the study also revealed that the advance from

1GMIS 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. 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 that policy actions foster the

development of formal structured trading systems.

Differences exist in the MIS landscape in the three countries studied. MIS in Egypt is dominated

by government-based providers partly because of government control of markets for strategic

commodities such as wheat, where it dominates domestic procurement and imports and

therefore determines. This has affected 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. It was

noted that, as was concluded by Christiansen et al. (2011) over six years ago, smallholder

farmers in Egypt continue to be held back by limited access to reliable market information.

Indonesia has a predominantly government-run system, which is regulated by specific

legislation and a regulatory framework with clearly defined roles for various providers: the

Ministry of Agriculture focuses on collecting and disseminating wholesale prices for agricultural

produce; the remit of the Ministry of Trade on retail prices; and the

Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS

or National Office of Statistics) has statutory authority to regulate information collection and

dissemination, including assuring

quality of information disseminated. Government funds MIS

operations, in part through utilising part of the staff time of personnel at relevant district,

provincial and national levels. The information collected is shared with major players such as

WFP, which monitors the food supply situation principally for food security reasons. Despite

being well-structured and generating information which is valuable to policymakers, evidence