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Ethiopian small ruminant keepers trained in ‘smart’ collective marketing
Saturday, 2017/01/07 | 06:05:46
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CGIAR 26 December 2016 by Paul Karaimu
Figure: Participants at a training in small ruminant smart marketing in Menz, Ethiopia (photo credit: ICARDA/Girma Kassie).
In Ethiopia, the major activities of the Livestock and Fish Program focus on small ruminant production and marketing and are led by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and public and private institutions.
The implementation of the program’s activities in the country uses the value chain approach as the main framework and initial comprehensive national qualitative and quantitative benchmarking surveys were conducted in selected and nationally representative sites to guide this process. The surveys identified key production and marketing challenges and opportunities for developing the small ruminant (sheep and goat) value chain in Ethiopia.
The surveys revealed that asymmetries in market information access and analytical capacity, lack of collective action, poor market infrastructure, and concomitantly higher production and transaction costs undermine the profitability and market performance of the small ruminant keepers in the country.
Smallholder farm households are too small to influence the market with their individual marketing behaviour. They are always less informed than the other actors in the market exposing them to the blunt forces of the market that arise from considerable information asymmetry. But farmers associations established based on self-interest and voluntarily can turn farmers into powerful actor in the markets. The critical role collective actions play in increasing the bargaining power of smallholder producers is well documented. Organized farmers can collectively generate market information and decide on supplying (and purchasing if needed) their animals to the market. By working together, farmers can avoid forced transactions that happen through bargaining of prices between them and brokers and buyers resulting in lower than expected prices.
Little or no collective action and access to information characterize the small ruminant markets of rural Ethiopia. But a new program implemented by the Livestock and Fish program is assessing ways of ensuring smallholder farmers benefit more from keeping and selling small ruminants. The ‘Smart marketing along the small ruminant value chains for sustainable livelihoods in Menz, Ethiopia’ project in implemented in the central highlands of Ethiopia. Twelve treatment and four control markets in the Menz area of North Shewa Zone in the Amhara Region have been selected. Treatment (information and grouping) markets have two levels i.e. either informed or uninformed and organized or unorganized. The combinations results in four treatments and hence the four markets in the informed and organized group (IO), four markets in the informed and unorganized (IU), four markets in the uninformed and organized (UO) and four markets in the uninformed and unorganized (UU or control) group. …. See https://livestockfish.cgiar.org/2016/12/26/ethiopia-smart-marketing/ |
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