Assessment of Farmers' Responses to Market-Oriented Production Policy: A Case Study in Eastern Shewa Zone, Oromiya Region, Ethiopia

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-