Economics of Sesame Marketing in Nigeria

Farmers’ participation in agricultural business is a prerequisite for their sustainability. Encouraging sesame producers to market participation has the potential to facilitate poverty alleviation by transforming subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture as well as unlocking the well-known benefits of trade. It has also been argued that farmers are the least benefit in the marketing chain as far as marketing encompasses all of the business activities performed in directing the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer or final user. This study was therefore undertaken to analyze the economics of sesame marketing. A combination of purposive and random sampling techniques was used for sample selection. Data were obtained through the use of a structured questionnaire, copies of which were administered to the selected 372 sesame farmers in Benue State. The result indicates that education; size of farm and output were factors that influence market participation by sesame farmers as well as lack of information (19.95%); Seasonality (18.10%); poor storage facilities (17.52%); cost of transportation (13.70%); High taxes (12.14%); Distance to market (9.60%) and bad road (8.96%) were constraints faced by sesame producers. It was also found that the sesame business is profitable with a marketing margin (M.M) of 68,433,764.25 Naira. The study further revealed that sesame farmers are economically efficient with a marketing efficiency (M.E) of 4.20 and finally sesame business is competitive as well as there is an inequality of income among sesame farmers with a Gini coefficient of 0.54. It was recommended that sesame producers should be properly informed on the market price through media and this will be achieved by setting a price control and also an investment on physical infrastructure (road network, warehouse, etc) should be done in remote areas. Government should invest on rural development projects in order to reduce production and marketing cost and sesame farmers should form a cooperative union in order to facilitate group sales which will increase their marketing margin.