Sesame (sesamun indicum L) Market Structure in Jigawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

Poor marketing structures among others have been identified to be one of the major issues limiting agricultural productivity in Nigeria. Sesame market structure in Jigawa state of Nigeria was examined by studying four sesame markets and also traders and selling agents. Two of the markets were rural (Suletankarkar and Kargo) while the other two were urban (Gumel and Maigatari).The markets were selected using a purposive random sampling. A non recurring survey was conducted in the selected markets in which 117 traders and 39 selling agents were interviewed from the list of their respective associations using a simple random sampling procedure. Questionnaires used as instrument of data collection were pre-tested. Times series data for sesame recorded for the period of 2000-2012 by Jigawa A.D.P. were also used. The data were analysed using Gini ratio analysis.  The Gini ratio for business concentration of rural selling agents and urban selling agents were 0.6013 and 0.5360 respectively. The Gini ratio for rural traders and urban traders were 0.3664 and 0.7838 respectively. The market structure analysis revealed that urban selling agents and rural traders command greater influence. The markets function with some level of imperfection. Market structure could be improved by breaking the dominance of the sesame market by few selling agents. This could take the form of making credits available to the traders and policy intervention in the form of incentives for value addition to sesame local purchasers.