Challenges and Prospects of Agricultural Marketing in Konta Special District, Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Background:-Agriculture in Ethiopia has directly or indirectly continued to be the source of livelihood to majority of the population. There are many kinds of agricultural products produced in the study area and the marketing of all these farm products generally tends to be a complex process. Agricultural marketing involves many operations and processes through which the food and raw materials move from the cultivated farm to the final consumers. In the study area market actors are facing increasing market inefficiency in local markets.Objective:-To assess the challenges and prospects of Agricultural Marketing in Konta Special district, Southern Ethiopia, 2016Methods: - A community based cross sectional study design was employed. 7 primary co-operative societies and 120 agricultural product traders were selected for the study. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 20. Besides this, qualitative data were collected analyzed using descriptive narrations to supplement the quantitative findings.Result: - This study showed that 80.9% was poor and 19.1% was good in agricultural marketing performance. Market information &linkage, road access, agro-processing& commercialization, ware housing, financial sectors development, presence of illegal traders, trust & business ethics, government support, legislation & control, presence of brokers , transaction cost on marketing and training and development were the major challenges of agricultural marketing in the study area.Conclusion: - Agricultural marketing performance in the study area was very low. Concerned bodies better work on those identified factors via to improve the efficiency of marketing system in the study area.

Keywords: Agricultural marketing, Challenges, Market actors, Konta special woreda.