andy, yes we considered the cost of information search during the 'growth' stage; more than treatment it was care, fertilizer per se. there is an interesting account of it in our paper. but we have some more findings on mobile phones and treatment [not in the usual way of taking a picture of a leaf and sending it to the expert] in the context of produce traceability. a presentation on it is at http://www.lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/de-silva_traceabili… cheers harsha

francois thanks for the comments and posting our paper on the FARA secretariat blog. [in fact a colleague just sent me a mail on it; how quick information flows now-a-days among the connected!] i must give more thought to your 'chain thinking' argument, it is a very logical construct and i am sure something that can be explored more in the current context, be it in africa or asia. cheers harsha

As an economist and a student of agricultural market efficiencies, I believe the future is to use ICTs [here mainly mobile telephony] to reduce information search costs in the agriculture value chain and to link the decision to grow with that of to sell. We at LIRNEasia did some preliminary work to understand the cost of information search for a group of small scale vegetable farmers in a district of Sri Lanka; from the point of making the decision to grow X or Y and selling the crop at the wholesale market. [Obviously the chain then moves along from there; adding value and final product at the retail level but we did not look at that.]. A draft report is available at [url]http://lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/transactioncosts.pdf [/url] We found that information search costs [here a part of transaction costs] was 11% of the total costs. Think about it; it is very high [it could be much higher in really rural areas]. Digging deeper we found that the distribution of these costs were skewed towards the decision to grow X or Y and to the decision to sell the resulting crop. Now is when the story becomes really interesting. What we now have is a process that is open-ended. What I mean is that the decision to grow X or Y is independent of the decision to sell the resulting crop. Ok, there is always informal discussion based on previous season's prices or expected demand and so on; but by and large the two decisions are independent. So the farmer decides to grow X, grows X and when the crop is harvested sells X. So where does the mobile phone or other ICT become important? In the most widely used form; to find prices. Whether real-time or otherwise; whether from 1 market or 5 nearby markets, the farmer will get information on prices. Now suppose, prices are low because many farmers decided to grow X; while our farmer will get a slightly better price than the farmer who did not get this price information, he is still in a bad way because he decided to grow X. This is where I believe mobile phone based ICT applications [from the simplest SMS format] will come in to make the biggest impact in creating efficiencies in agricultural markets by transforming this open-ended decision making to one that is closed. I call it a closed-loop value chain. Here, the decision to grow X is linked to the decision to sell X. To generalize it, it is like you undertaking a consultancy job knowing you have an agreement with someone to purchase it; to be more specific, it is like out-grower farmers growing gherkins knowing that the MacDonald's will purchase the pickles. Of course I know there are going to be many hurdles to cross, particularly in rural developing countries spread across Asia and Africa, but I believe at the end of the day, farmers will see there is intrinsic value in closing the loop at a micro [or household] level; i.e. to get an agreement to sell what you decide to grow. This was not possible until now, but with the growing usage of mobile phones, it is becoming more and more plausible. I see a trickle of more forward thinking farmers adopting this and the trickle becoming bigger. There are a lot more verticals and horizontals that I have not spoken about here, but, this essentially will be the structure. There are many initiative that we could improve and scale up to make this happen... And I agree with Sameera, there are enough incentives for private sector operators to get in to this "business", but we need a start. Who knows, I may be completely off track, but, this is how I see the future of mobile phones and ICT applications in agriculture; helping create efficiencies in agricultural markets. [/img][/url]

Helene, you and I are on the same page. I am not attempting to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of rural farmers, but the fact is to make a farmer start using e-enabled information services, we must ensure that the process is gradual. We may not be able to reduce his transaction costs by a significant amount at the start with only sms, but that would be the start.

Contrary to what we theorize the evidence of farmers actually using mobile phone based applications in agriculture is still not there in any significant way. Yes, there are many good projects [lots of pilots] but there aren't so many large sustainable programs. I grant that with increasing levels of affordable access it will change and become possible to walk the talk. We, at LIRNEasia recently looked at the information search [transaction] costs of a selected group of small holder vegetable farmers in Sri Lanka from the point of deciding to grow to selling at the wholesale market and found it was as high as 11% of the total production cost. Some of these findings are at http://lirneasia.net/projects/2006-07/icts-transaction-costs-traceabili… We also found that the use of mobile phones for obtaining necessary agriculture related information among this group was very low, thus creating a significant opportunity to create mobile-phone based e-agriculture applications. If we are to succeed, we must not try to replicate the e-agriculture services we attempted to provide over the kiosks and telecentres [unsuccessful for the most part] over mobile phones. Farmers do need information, and that information is usually available, but if the manner in which it is disseminated is complicated, the farmers won't bother to obtain that information and continue to make decisions without that information or obtain that information the traditional way at a significant cost. So we have to understand what specific information they need, when they need it, how much they are willing to pay for it and so on. Request-driven models, in my view, might better reflect the incentive-cost structure than the case where information gets pushed to the farmer periodically. But then again, the Jensen case does not have any mobile-based application. All that happened was that the fishermen were able to communicate with the traders on shore to determine prices. There were no applications; there were no fancy model, only the opportunity to communicate between the boat and the shore. PS. mike glad you liked the scoping study :wink: