Improving Agricultural Market Performance:
Developing Agricultural Market Information Systems
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Despite numerous international projects and NGO efforts, not a lot seems to have changed in
Egypt for the past decade or more when USAID (2006) identified the following issues:• Small farmers often have less information about output prices than local traders or
exporters, and thus have a weak bargaining position at the time of sale or at the time a
contract is set for future delivery
• Farmers lack critical information about the optimal timing of planting and marketing
of crops.
• Lack of suitable contract conditions and enforcement mean that agreed prices are in
any case hard to maintain and farmers struggle in these circumstances because they
have no independent source of price information for validation of claim.
It is apparent from the foregoing that Egypt has under-invested in MIS as a means of improving
agricultural productivity. An impact of this in the long term has been that the private sector has
invested in and evolved its own MIS, which means that any new public or private systems of
information supply have to compete with these sunk costs.Linked to this is evidence from interviews conducted indicating the need to build capacity
especially at the level of small-scale farmers in using up to date ICT systems which can unlock
the huge potential available, reduce the currently high (but unmeasured) postharvest losses and
promote important strategic goals such as equity, food security and food safety.