Improving Agricultural Market Performance:

Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems

but FAO/EBRD (2015) report lack of transparency on stocks of wheat and wheat products,

deliveries, demand and forecasting. FAO/EBRD (ibid.) further estimate that the complexity of

wheat tenders and postharvest costs adds USD30/tonne to the domestic price of wheat.

Among the challenges the country faces in boosting domestic food production capacity are land

fragmentation (Alfiky et al, 2009), water-use conflicts (Fick and Bushra, 2014), environmental

degradation and the impacts of climate change (Fawaz and Soliman, 2016). In addition, the

agricultural credit system, necessary for smallholder farmers to invest in production, has largely

collapsed in recent years. A National Agricultural Bank exists with over 5,000 branches but has

a limited loan portfolio for smallholder farmers. The main cause is that farmers are not prepared

to risk offering land as collateral and have no other sources of collateral to secure loans. This

finding is supported by Christiansen (2011). Other challenges include the need to restructure

the highly centralised wheat market as well as improve the informal and unstructured markets

for other crops including tomatoes. Mobile phone coverage and ownership is relatively high and

reported to be close to 100% in terms of ownership of handsets and over 30% in terms of

ownership of smart phones.

Baseline information on farmers’ market information sources and needs gathered from

vegetable farmers in Upper Egypt by the El-Meehy (2011) and depicted in Figure 29 shows the

range of different information sources as well as the high level of dependence of farmers on

information provided by traders. Thus, the power and influence of traders in owning market

information is clearly illustrated. It is also interesting to note that this is universal in Egypt

regardless of land size, which varies across governates.

Figure 29: Source of Market and Price Information for Horticulture by Governate

Source: UNDP (2011

Adapted from the original in which some individual percentages did not necessarily add up to 100%.