ANALYSIS OF CROP MARKET PERFORMANCES: THE CASE OF MASALEMIA MARKET IN ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

An efficient agricultural marketing is crucial for effective agricultural and rural development, which areprecondition for sustained increase in agricultural production, and producer’s income. This study examined crop marketing performance in Mesalemia crop market of Addis Ababa, were very densely populated which comprise more than 2500 traders and unknown number of producers and consumers in Addis Ababa.The study was based thegathered data 200 sample from population using probability sampling design of multi-stage sampling technique with two stages, in the first stage is stratified based on trading tribute of producers, traders, consumers and stakeholdersandin the second stageprobability proportional sample size (PPS), to each strata of market actors were50 from producers, 100 from traders, 20 from Consumers and 30 from Stakeholders was also collected fromthe farm of the producers, from the bureau of concerned stakeholders and from Mesalemia crop market of traders and consumers. Data was collected through the interview by using survey methodby degree of semi structured questionnairefrom all market actors and stakeholders. The market concentration indicated that the crop market structure at Mesalemiais fairly competitive. The major barriers to entry and constraints to crop trade in Mesalemia included lack of working capital; market information and high competition with unlicensed traders have a negative impact on the performance of the crop marketing system. The possible recommendations forwarded are support formal access to credit for traders and farmers, strengthen access to market information encourage licensing of traders, intervention to increase production by using improved agricultural inputs, strengthen and conduct a research on the different components of the Mesalemia marketing system.