A value chain analysis of sweet potato commodity marketing

Abstract

A thorough analysis of farmers’ purchasing power is very important because of agricultural products’ unique characteristics that likely position farmers more vulnerably. In this respect, we seek to anayze farmers’ purchasing power and market conditions of an agricultural product (sweet potatoes) by using the value chain and SCP (structure, conduct, performance) analyses. This study is administered in Bergas Sub-district, Semarang Regency that exhibit high potentials of sweet potato products. Our research sample are farmers, marketing institutions, and governments that are selected with the purposive sampling and snowball sampling methods. The results show that sweet potatoes marketing in this sub-district has four marketing channels and the market structure is oligopoly. The concentration ratio (CR4) of 0.52 indicates that the market has weak concentration with the Minimum Efficiency Scale (MES) score of 65%, implying that new competitors are obstructed to enter the market. Further, the fourth market channel has efficient marketing system performance with the marketing margin of Rp 1,500/ kg and farmers’ market share of 57.14%. Overall, our results suggest that farmers have to select short marketing chains and sell their products to final consumers.