ICT Adoption and Its’ Implications for Agriculture in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Agriculture is the backbone of the Sri Lankan economy and it constantly experiences with advances in technology. Because of the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the world, each organization or person has to concern their products and services more towards modernized and ICT related manner. This research contribute to understand the adoption & use of ICT, identify the constraints associated with ICT use and propose recommendations with managerial implications towards the improvement of present ICT system in agriculture sector of Sri Lanka. Tea producers and poultry farmers in Kurunegala District were served for the survey. A scoring system was used to develop continuous dependent variables which were used in regression models to identify the variables most significantly influencing ICT use. Least significant difference technique was used to identify comparisons of constraints in ICT adoption and use. There were 60.6% of the participants who used ICT related equipments or facilities for their business and 76.1% of the participants having ICT uptake problems, where telecommunication and internet reported higher impact on agriculture sector. The participants stressed the cost of technology, lack of training, trust level in the ICT system, lack of ICT proficiency and lack of technological infrastructure are thresholds for ICT adoption and use. Managers can use these results to promote ICT adoption that can lead to more efficient communication and increased demand for the firm's products and services. The usage of different ICT applications was comparatively high in tea sector and in general the usage of mobile communication was common among all participants. This survey results provide insights which suggest corrective steps to expedite ICT adoption and prioritize the necessary research. Index Terms: ICT adoption; constraints; tea; poultry; ICT DOI: 10.4038/jfa.v1i2.1799 Journal of Food and Agriculture Vol.1(2) 2008 pp.54-63