Improving Agricultural Market Performance:

Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems

demand data. This encourages uptake of market information by private actors, not so much

because of the dissemination technology but more so because of the content and the fact the MIS

is linked to market-supporting institutions.

Though there have been several pilots market institutions in the African Group of OIC countries,

the institutions (e.g. WRS and commodity exchanges) remain underdeveloped. As such the most

advanced capability to utilise market information is in the public sector, with its focus on food

security. As in other cases in the OIC countries, national price information dissemination is

integrated with regional and international MIS which provide output forecasts as well as track

regional flows of strategic food products. There are also efforts to develop advanced 2GMIS

platforms which facilitate monitoring of production and marketing by producers, which has the

potential to increase the supply of finance to players in the agricultural value chains. However,

uptake of the new types of 2GMIS remains low as output forecasting and stock monitoring

capabilities are underdeveloped. The expectation is that progress is burgeoning as a result of

advances in ICT and further development of market institutions in these countries.

The evidence in this chapter is confirmed by the outcome of the online survey conducted as part

of this study. It shows that there is still a need to improve existing MIS beyond the introduction

of new dissemination technology in order to optimise their positive impact on agricultural

marketing systems. The existing situation is stymieing uptake of the information services by

market players (especially farmers and traders) though policymakers continue to use the

information provided. Improving the content of the information provided, especially in aligning

price information to opportunities to sell into formal market segments where trade is set around

standardisedweights and quality is one area that needs paying attention to going forward. These

issues affect all types of providers, with the notable exception of commodity exchanges. Thus,

the way forward does not appear to be to shift from government to provision by private or

professional organisations but rather to deal with the identified weaknesses. Furthermore, for

policymakers, it will appear that it is not the regulatory framework which is the biggest

challenge in improving uptake of MIS. What is needed is to tie investments in improving MIS to

efforts to promote innovative marketing systems such as commodity exchanges. This is because

the transparent information they generate through transactions are reliable and can potentially

trigger market participation by the main actors. These observations are further examined in the

next chapter which reports on the three country cases.