The role of motorized transport and mobile phones in the diffusion of agricultural information in Tanggamus Regency, Indonesia

Petr Matous (), Yasuyuki Todo and Ayu Pratiwi

Transportation, 2015, vol. 42, issue 5, 790 pages

Abstract: Limited access to agricultural information constrains the well-being of farmers in developing countries and leads to environmental deterioration. Although new information-communication technologies (ICTs) are expected to alleviate this problem, the importance of physical mobility is rarely considered. This study explores the roles of motorized transport and mobile phones in the diffusion of agricultural information within and between Indonesian farming communities. In 2012, we surveyed 315 household heads from 16 coffee and cocoa farming groups in Sumatra. The respondents identified 1575 sources from which they obtained agricultural information, the exact location of the sources, and the mode of contact. In 2013, we followed up with in-depth interviews of 20 farmers to obtain a qualitative description of their agricultural information-seeking behavior. Although 75 % of respondents had a mobile phone, the main mode of information sharing was face-to-face meetings for 97 % of the elicited relationships. Mobile phones were used to communicate with people living at the edge of the regular physical mobility radius enabled by motorbikes (approximately 10 km). A hierarchical logit model was applied to examine the implications of the respondents’ tendency to use motorized transport vis-à-vis walking for information gathering. Respondents with a higher general preference for faster transport tended to have more extensive access to information from other communities. However, we also find weak evidence that individual motorized transport might decrease internal social contact and information exchange inside these communities. The policy implication for rural development in less-industrialized countries is that providing ICTs without increasing the inhabitants’ mobility through appropriate means may not significantly improve the inhabitants’ access to important information and the diffusion of successful agricultural practices. Copyright The Author(s) 2015

Keywords: Personal networks; Information diffusion; Walking; Motorized transport; Community; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11116-015-9646-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:transp:v:42:y:2015:i:5:p:771-790

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-015-9646-6

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().