Vegetable Market Performance in Smallholders Production System: The Case of Lake Tana Basin, Ethiopia

Lake Tana basin is one of the most potential vegetable production areas in Ethiopia. However, production in this region has been carried out at smallholders' level with poor marketing infrastructure. Hence, this study was aimed to examine the structure and performance of vegetable marketing in the Lake Tana basin. Multistage random sampling mixed with non probability sampling techniques were employed to collect data from 385 smallholder vegetable producing farmers and 107 vegetable traders from three districts and two major town markets. Data were analyzed using market structure and performance indicators. The result of the analysis showed that market structure in the study area could be characterized by weak oligopolistic market with little chance of market participants to influence market price. Storage loss and transport cost were found the two largest cost components of vegetable marketing in the study area. Net marketing margin and producers' share of the consumers' price could be improved by shortening the distance between the producer and urban consumer or reducing the intermediaries involved. Establishing farmers' group marketing with communication access together with least cost storage and transport technologies should be encouraged to improve vegetable marketing performance.