WESTERN BUREAU:
THE MIDDLEMEN who trade in farm produce are still believed to be making the most profit out of the pursuit of domestic crop production, and the Jamaica Agricultural Society has began lobbying for a reversal of the trend.
"We have commissioned someone to do an assessment of the marketing situation in Jamaica and here is what they have found: the middleman who moves the goods between the farm and the market have attached substantial mark-ups to the farmers produce," said JAS chief executive officer, Robert Reid.
The JAS is now pushing for farmers to market their own produce, cutting out the middleman, and in so doing addressing the expensive prices at which local produce reach consumers.
Singling out a few popular items sold in the local markets, he told western Jamaica farmers that the findings showed a mark-up between the farm gate and market for carrots of 65 per cent; for tomatoes it is high as 157 per cent, root crops like sweet yam, 42 per cent, and dasheens, 55.8 per cent.
"When you compare the average farm gate price of our tomatoes using the 1999 price of $41.51 and then you match that against the landing price of $19.65 (for imported tomatoes). How can you compete?" Mr. Reid asked the farmers.
"When the middleman moves your yam or tomato and marks it up by as much as 157 per cent, by the time it reaches the market it is extremely uncompetitive."
The chief executive officer declared that the time has now come for the farmers to have a marketing system that does not incur this heavy mark-up between farm gate and the marketplace. He said that the time has also come when farmers who make arrangements with the JAS to supply the farm store, stand by those arrangements.
"Many times when the JAS goes for the products you hear that the higglers came and bought the products."
However, a few farmers stood to defend the move to sell their products to the higglers on the grounds that the JAS is sometimes tardy in collecting the produce, which they say, are perishable and cannot wait indefinitely until their trucks arrive.
One yam farmer and chairman and chief organiser of the JAS branch society in upper Trelawny chided the organisation for reneging on a promise to purchase yams from branch members in her area.
However, on the point of the mark-up by middlemen who are predominantly higglers, one expert in agriculture marketing, who requested anonymity, said that many are underestimating the cost of marketing agricultural produce in this country.
"The cost of marketing the produce of agriculture can be quite significant," she told Farmers Weekly, costs that explain some of the mark up on the produce.
The buyer, she said, invariably makes several stops, at several farms, in the process of purchasing and assembling the goods. There is significant cost in trucking the produce from the farms to the market for transportation to the market gate, unloading, and bringing the produce to the immediate point of sale, and market fees.
Spoilage and other expenses too have to be factored into the middleman's cost.
"When all these expenses are considered, we will find that these middlemen fall short of making the kind of profit that the JAS study is reporting," the marketer said.
Despite acknowledgement that the middlemen often bargain away the farmers selling price and sometimes take the crops on credit but fail to pay, the meeting still felt that without them, domestic crop farmers would long have been put out of business.
