Fresh insights: user research towards a market information service for bihari vegetable farmers

Abstract

Agricultural market information (MI) services provide smallholder farmers with convenient access to price information and have demonstrated potential to improve their incomes. Some recent evaluations of MI systems, however, have shown disappointing results and brought forth many complicating factors. Cautious of the mixed literature, we investigate the potential effectiveness and likely limitations of an MI service for improving livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the context of Loop, a shared transport-to-market-service for farmers. We conducted interviews with 17 farmers and 3 commission agents in Buxar, Bihar (India). Consistent with "information scarcity" and "information asymmetry" theories, we report how many farmers in this area regularly use mobile phones to check prices for choosing markets and negotiating transactions. Participants reported increases in the numbers of traders and price stabilization since the arrival of mobile phones. However, we found many other diverse factors that often outweigh the importance of market prices and inhibit market access, including market capacity, time, unfamiliarity with new markets, personal relationships, attitudes towards risk, credit relationships, and physical danger. Finally, to probe which of these additional factors might be addressable using an MI service, we present exploratory findings from preliminary user-interface studies.