| Abstract: | Investors, traders, decision-makers and all those who are based in the towns and have
dealings with farmers need to be well informed about rural communities. But the depth of
research and media coverage of this crucial sector remains generally inadequate. To that
end, a farm level survey was conducted in order to better understand farmers' responses to
market-oriented production policy and to identify marketing problems faced by small-scale
fanners in four districts (Ada, Lume, Akaki and Gimbichu) of Oromiya Region in the
central highlands of Ethiopia. In all the study districts, the results showed that 58% of the
respondents are aware of the market-oriented production policy that the country followed.
But 40% of the sampled households attached no importance to the market-oriented
production policy due to various production constraints, such as, scarcity of land (88%),
large family size (71%) and lack of improved technologies (34%). About 27.3% of the
sampled formers reported that the objective of their farm is to produce for own
consumption and not for market. When asked as to whether they store grain as they used
to do before or not, almost 77% of the sampled farmers responded negatively mainly due to
urgent needs to repay fertilizer credits (94%), low production of farm products (57%), price
attraction at harvest (33%) and fear of storage pests (18%)> Overall, the vast majority of
respondents reported that they sell farm products to settle fertilizer debt and to buy
necessary items required for household consumption. The study employed the Tobit
econometric model for analyzing factors influencing farmers' responses to market-oriented
production policy. The model revealed that four socio-economic factors namely age,
education, technology and access to marketing information had statistically significant
effect on market-oriented production policy- |
