Determinants of Market Participation of Maize Farmers in Rural Osun State of Nigeria

Abstract: The study investigated the levels of market participation of small-scale maize farmers in Osun State, Nigeria with objective of examining the determinants of their market participation. A multi-stage sampling technique was employed in the selection of the respondents. The first stage is the purposive selection of ten Local Government Areas from the six agricultural zones in the state. The second stage involved random selection of six villages from each Local Government Area (LGA). The third stage was random selection of 24 farmers from each village. Tobit model was used to analyse the factors affecting market participation while Regression model was used to analyse the volume of maize offered to the market for sale. The result of the Tobit model correctly predicted 67% of the observation with a significant chi square of 52.93 and it shows the overall significance of the model. All variables had positive coefficients significantly different from zero except years of education, transaction cost, marital status and household size. This means that a unit increase in the quantity of these variables will increase the proportion of maize offered for sale by the respondents. The result of the regression model also showed that R -Square and adjusted R-Square are respectively 91% and 90% with a significant overall fit. Volume of maize sold by individual respondents was used as the dependent variable. Total maize produced (p<0.01), age (p<0.05), years of education (p<0.10), ownership of cultivating equipment (p<0.01), access to non farm income (p<0.05), and belonging to farmers' association (p<0.01), means of information (p<0.10), all had a significant and positive relationship with the volume of sales. This suggests that an increase in any of these variables will lead to an increase in the volume of maize offered for sale while marital status (p<0.05), and transportation cost (p<0.05), had a negative and significant relationship with the volume of maize sold and this is in line with the a priori expectation. The study recommends that effort should be made at establishing more points of sales in farming areas in order to lower transportation costs to promote market participation and youths should be encouraged to participate in agricultural production and consequently market participation so as to inject new blood into the system