Improving Agricultural Market Performance:

Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems

Horticulture Export Improvement Association (HEIA)

Started in 2005 under a USAID funded project, the Horticulture Export Improvement

Association included market price bulletins for its members three times a week. Christiansen et

al. (2006) reported that the system was unsustainable and no evidence could be found of it

during this short case study.

The Poultry Bourse

Egypt set up a Poultry Bourse in 2002 with offices in all Provinces. All commercial poultry

producers have to sell through the Bourse and this is regulated by the Ministry of Agriculture.

All delivery trucks have transponders and this allows all shipments of live chicken to be traced.

A fee is charged for this service. Daily prices are set by a committee above the cost of production

and allowing a deviation for distance. The prices are then distributed by the government

television service or word of mouth.

The case for this system was based upon the power asymmetry between poultry producers and

market agents which was forcing prices below production costs. The poultry bourse is an

interesting and novel model. Forcing all participants to use the bourse and its single price

against a fee negates the market information ‘cost’ for sellers and changes the power dynamic

of the market.

5.4

ASSESSMENT OF EXISTING MIS IN EGYPT

Christiansen et al. (2011) in a study over six years back noted that smallholder farmers are held

back by limited access to reliable market information and that this situation hampered planting

decisions as well as marketing decisions, especially in terms of choice of trader/wholesaler with

whom to trade. It can be reported that the situation has not changed much as at the time of the

mission and there is need to improve the system. One area which needs to be addressed is that

of enabling policies in the agricultural sector. For instance, government control of the wheat

market does not only limit the utility of market information for players in that chain but also

constraints investments in other subsectors.

The tomato sub-sector is a good example. Here farmers use state of the art crop management,

production and traceability practices in order to enter the European Union market. The

Government of Egypt has supported this effort with a number of policies (UNIDO, 2015). In

domestic market, no such policy support exists and losses are reported to be very extensive

Segmentation of the market which results from this makes interpretation of market informat

rather difficult and discourages uptake. Furthermore, the private MIS which exist for crops such

as tomatoes disseminate information mainly through televisions and bulletins in wholesale

markets and are unavailable to smallholder farmers.

A rough map of the Egyptian MIS is shown in Table 7. During the short case study it was not

possible to completely explore the entire Egyptian agricultural sector in detail, therefore this

table generalises based on interviews with key informants in the Ministry of Agriculture.

20 MALR (pers. comms.)