Market Information (MI) Journal Makes a Large Impact During Its First Year
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| Ahroohliad (Agro-review), a journal by the Agricultural Marketing Project in Ukraine, reaches 12,000 clients each month (picture taken by Robert Lee). |
Challenge:
Ukraine has long been known for its substantial share of the most fertile land in the world. Twenty-four percent of 22.5 million of the Ukrainian workforce work in the agricultural sector. Lack of timely consolidated information on the Ukrainian agricultural markets is one of many obstacles that impede work for farmers working in fruit and vegetable industry. The marketing information on fruit and vegetables distributed in a scattered and sporadic fashion, have been limiting farmers to selling their produce on local markets, thus reducing their revenues.
Initiative:
AMP saw the need in consolidating up-to-date agricultural information in both, print and electronic formats. With the assistance of a subcontractor APK-Inform, it published two journals and launched an up-to-date website. Monthly Agro-review and weekly Agro-review+ journals are distributed to about 3,000 subscribers each month. Both the website and journals contain comprehensive information on the Ukrainian agricultural markets, particularly the fruit and vegetable markets including: market news, offers and bids, current market prices; technological updates, specialized articles written by AMP staff, farmers, and outside specialists; and contact and buying information of interest to wholesalers, processors, and retailers.
AMP and APK-Inform provides timely price and volume information from 16 market centers of Ukraine. These include six oblasts where AMP works and major centers, including Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. This information is updated each Friday, and by Saturday morning is on its way to AMP clients. For those who have internet access, it becomes available once it has been inputted to the AMP database.
AMP also designed an offer and bids system to improve farmers’ marketing channels and provide them with an opportunity to advertise their produce free of charge. The system turned to be a source of valuable information for the AMP project. By tracking market trends and participants, AMP can better design and adjust its initiatives to meet farmers’ needs.
Results:
Since its inception, the MI component has been highly utilized and complemented by fruit and vegetable farmers, input suppliers, wholesalers, processors retailers, and institutional organizations.
3,000 readers receive directly the AMP Agro-review & Agro-review+ journals. Through reprints and use by various media, AMP information reaches 50,000 users weekly.
The AMP website receives over 10,000 visitors each month and is ranked as the number one in the food & agricultural sector by www.bigmir.net, a local search engine which tracks and rates Ukrainian websites in terms of utilization.
In September 2004, the listings of bids and offers for fruits and vegetables counted 1,500 – 2,000 entries per week. According to a survey conducted by AMP’s market information staff, 43 percent of respondents said that they had contacted suppliers and/or buyers based on the bids and offers system. Twenty percent of surveyed producers said they actually sold there produce using AMP information. It also helped 2,000 farmers to generate an estimated 15 million UAH (about $3 million) in additional revenues as a result of reduced costs for inputs and better prices for products sold. At the current time, it is estimated that this number has risen to 60 million UAH and will be confirmed in the next reporting period.
Quote:
Rozana Omelchuk, “Rozana” Farm: “At first, I was quite skeptical about placing an offer at the web-page of AMP & in Ahroohliad+. But after doing so, I received several phone calls from potential onions buyers and have earned more than US $10,000 of revenue.”
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