Competitiveness of Organic Pineapple Marketing in Uganda:

Export oriented organic pineapple marketing has been practiced in Uganda in a bid to improve the livelihoods of the smallholder farmers involved in organic agriculture. However, this sub-sector faces various challenges at various levels but with a major emphasis at the farm level. The limited pineapple quantities procured by the organic export companies (the organic market in our case), particularly during the peak season, poses a serious market challenge for the farmers. Based on the data collected from 275 organic and conventional pineapple farmers, this book reports on various investigations carried out in relation to organic pineapple marketing at the farm level. These include organic farmers choice and participation in the conventional pineapple market and their marketing performance in the organic market. Both econometric and non-parametric frontier (mathematical programming) approaches are used for the analyses. The factors found to significantly influence the organic farmers decisions to sell pineapples to the conventional market include, farmers pineapple-farming experience; annual pineapple harvests, total annual pineapples lost and organic market premium price in the peak season. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) results from the three clusters of the considered organic farmers, attached to the three export companies reveal existence of marketing inefficiencies within all the farmer groups, although at varying levels. In addition to favourable organic agricultural policies, this study suggests intensification of farmers access to, and use of pineapple value addition strategies, farmer credit schemes and integration of Cooperate Social Responsibility (CSR) within the export companies policy. These are all geared towards correcting the shortfalls analysed for the different indicators.