Improving Agricultural Market Performance:

Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems

3.7

LESSONS FROM MIS MODELS IN NON-OIC COUNTRIES

The discussions global best-practices in MIS in this chapter have shown that agricultural MIS

have generally evolved from the 1GMIS to the more technology-intensive 2GMIS. The 2GMIS

includes public MIS platforms, consisting of national platforms run by governments as well as

international/regional platforms run and/or funded by multilateral donor agencies. Also

available are private 2GMIS platforms including those which are run by independent private

providers as well as those linked directly to commodity exchanges and associated market-

supporting institutions such as WRS.

It is evident that the 1GMIS platforms contributed to the better management of sector policy,

especially in relation to mitigation of imminent food crisis. The progression to 2GMIS run by

public agencies has further enhanced international, regional and national capacity to respond to

the food crisis. This is partly because the regional and international MIS go beyond

disseminating price data and provide critically-needed information on output forecasts and

stock monitoring which can signal imminence of significant supply shortfalls. A notable example

of such an international platform is AMIS, the membership of which includes some OIC member

countries. Another example, which is a sub-regional platform in West Africa and is discussed in

this chapter is RESIMAO.

However, in terms of contributing to improvements in agricultural input and output marketing

systems, progression to 2GMIS is yet to produce the expected results despite tangible evidence

of progress in addressing some of the weaknesses of the 1GMIS, including speeding up

processing and dissemination of information. Data accuracy is one such persisting challenge and

is attributable to the continued reliance of most platforms on the collection of price data from

interviewing traders, who often have an apparent conflict of interest. Most of the existing 2GMIS

also tend to focus on publishing nominal price data with little or no analysis of trends to guide

marketing and investment decisions by players in agricultural value chains. Furthermore, there

are significant information gaps, including lack of reliable information output forecast and stock

levels at national and individual farmers’ levels. The former is critical in determining the

direction of movement of future prices whilst the latter can enable lenders and trade

counterparties to determine and monitor the risk of non-performance by borrowers and

signatories to forward contracts. Unsurprisingly, these factors have hampered the uptake of MIS

even where dissemination is via mobile telephones.

The prospects going forward appear bright in terms of addressing some of these shortcomings

of the 2GMIS partly because of the potential to take advantage of advances in ICT to reduce the

identified information gaps. Lessons from African countries, such as Zambia and South Africa,

also demonstrate that where MIS has been linked directly to the development market

institutions such as WRS and commodity exchanges, the outcome has been mutually beneficial.

In the next chapter, we review MIS in OIC member countries to assess the extent to which their

experiences are consistent with or diverge from what has been observed in the non-OIC

countries.