Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
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5.3 PRIVATE MIS INITIATIVES IN EGYPT
Outside the wheat sector, free trade operates. Respondents indicated that most market
information in Egypt is shared by word of mouth. All Egyptian farmers are members of
cooperatives, but these are largely moribund and do not provide any market information to
members. Where exports are concerned and scale is large, farmers subscribe to private
international price information systems specific to those commodities. The Chamber of Food
Industries provides subscribers, who are all large-scale, with regular price and market news
bulletins taken from international commercial services. Three new ICT-based MIS initiatives
were identified during the mission, Bashaier, WE and HEIA. These are described below:
Bashaier oundation (KEF) claim that their Bashaier Network
is the first of its kind in Egypt with the aim of doing digital trading
t eatures of the platform, which are similar to private 2GMIS in theO, are regular prices, historical price analysis, weather reports and
technical tips (see Figure 30). They also want to have a trading element. During a period of
donor funding, they set up 50 farmer associations with 45,000 members, largely in the
horticulture sub-sector. They have on-going initiatives in both micro-dairy and fish. At the
moment the Bashaier network does not have elaborate monitoring and evaluation plans. The
system is subscription based with different packages ranging from EGP8 – 25 a month.
However, KEF acknowledged that sustainability of the system largely depends upon KEF finding
new donors.
Figure 30: Examples of Information Provided by Bashaier
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