Determinants of Level of Market Participation among Vegetable Farmers in Lagos

Markets play a basic role in general economic welfare and among vegetable farming households. Market participation offers benefits in terms of income and opportunities for rural employment to farmers. However, due to inconsistent production, farmers who are resource-poor cannot produce a stable amount of output yearly as a result they cannot acquire contracts with traders in the market. Therefore, this study examined level of market participation by vegetable farmers in Lagos State, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling was used to select vegetable farmers. Purposive sampling was the first stage while the second stage was random selection of seventy farmers. The last stage was the sample selection model of vegetable marketed. Data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics, Market Participation Index (MPI) and Probit regression model. Farmers were classified based on the threshold of MPI value between 0.8 – 1.0 as high level market participant and 0.1–0.79 as low. The result showed that most of the farmers were female (55.7%), mean age 48.1±8.53 years and married (88.6%) with household size between 5 and 8 persons (77.1%). Most 65.7% have less than 0.5ha with less than 5 years in vegetable farming. Considering the market attributes, 71.4% were members of farmers’ association, 52.9% had no access to credit, 60% owned communication assets, 60% owned transport equipment, 74.3% were not involved in group marketing, 35.7% travelled as far as more than 5km to sell and only 32.9% had high level market participation. The regression result revealed that age (p<0.10); marital status (p<0.10), farm size (p<0.05), being involved in group marketing (p<0.01) and access to credit (p<0.05), significantly determine probability of high level market participation. Therefore, the hypotheses were rejected based on the significance level criterion. The study concludes that to improve the level of market participation of vegetable farmers in the study area, farmland, access to credit and group marketing are the foci points for the relevant policy makers, government and stakeholders in the vegetable sector of agriculture. Therefore, it is recommended that group marketing should be encouraged by all the tiers of government, policy on access to credit by real farmers to be formulated and implemented by the relevant government agency and land reform act should be reviewed to allow access to land by famers for increased output and high market participation