This panel comes at a stage where LIRNEasia is trying to go beyond the passive use of ICTs to how ICTs can be used for welfare. What I’m going to start with is to ask Sriganesh to set the context for this particular session.
Sriganesh: What the rural poor is looking for is reliable and good quality information. What they care about is enhancing their livelihoods. They’re looking for locally driven content in local languages, demand driven more than push. The end result is that using these methodologies, we want them to improve their livelihood strategies.
What have we done? We’ve explored a range of technologies to provide market prices. We’ve also found out how the bottom of the pyramid has used ICTs.
Harsha de Silva: What we really ought to do is move farmers from supplying the needs of the household to supplying the marketplace. Unless we do that we’re going to be stuck in subsistence agriculture and being poor. How can information and knowledge be used to create efficient farmer markets.
The problem with market efficiency is transaction costs. Transaction costs are very high, so these markets are inefficient if they exist at all. This is the information search costs, therefore the role of ICT is to lower this cost. This will enable small farmers to participate in the market. If they can participate to whatever extent then you can move that supply from the household needs to the market needs and benefit from that process.
A lot of the focus has been on selling. The work we have been doing is in Dambulla. We’ve started looking at three types of farmers.
- Farmer who has already brought produce to the market, to help them get the best prices
- If the farmer has not brought to market, to help them decide to bring or not
- If produce is to be harvested, to decide whether to harvest today or tomorrow
- If not planted, or many days, then to help farmer enter forward agreements
Currently even within the market there are different prices. What we did was put it a few computers and people collecting data with PDAs. We then put boards around the market. It does a couple things at the beginning. The information helps him strategize if he should stick around for a while. A caveat is that it is not this simple. Traders have sometimes given loans and they’re bound to sell, so whatever price is immaterial.
What we found, however, is that the bargaining price has improved somewhat. That information became meaningful to the negotiating process. Having had a long discussion with Bill, what I’m saying is that this reduces the price dispersion at one point in time, it’s not necessarily that it reduces volatility over time.
We’re planning a national launch on Tuesday, moving towards a National Agriculture Exchange. This is what we’re trying to do.
Comments are closed.