Sweet Potato Marketing Among Smallholder Farmers: The Role of Collective Action

Eric Mukundi, Mary K. Mathenge and Margaret Ngigi

No 160679, 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE)

Abstract: Participation of smallholder producers in market-oriented production holds potential for diversifying their incomes and increase agriculture productivity hence promoting food security and poverty eradication. However, participation of smallholders in commercialized production is generally limited by various institutional, technical and investment constraints along the supply chain. Collective action presents a potential channel for addressing such bottlenecks in the supply chain but favourable policies must be geared towards smallholder agriculture in order to ensure successful collective action. This paper investigates the role of collective action in smallholder market participation using a sample of 150 sweet potatoes producing households in Southwest Kenya. Our findings suggest that market participation is predominantly determined by the resource base of a household whereby, size of land owned is a fundamental factor. Furthermore, the results provide supportive evidence that participation in collective action has the potential to strengthen market participation among the poor and marginalized smallholder producers.

Keywords: Crop Production/Industries; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/160679/files/E ... Margaret%20Ngigi.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaae13:160679

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.160679

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().