Effect Of Use Of Road Transportation On Marketing Of Agricultural Produce Among Rural Farmers In Imo State Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The study assessed the effect of use of road transportation on marketing of agricultural produce among rural farmers in Imo State, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used in sampling 180 respondents for the study. Data for the study were collected with the use of structured questionnaire and analyzed with IBM software SPSS version 20 statistics package. The result showed that the majority (62.2%), had mean age of 39 years, 82.8% were married, had household size of 8 persons, had mean household size of 1 hectare, about 46.7% had primary education and earned mean monthly income of N142,000. The result further revealed that motorcycle (54.4%) was the major mode of transportation used in marketing agricultural produce in the study area. The result also revealed that the respondents to a high extent utilized motorcycle ( =3.89), keke ( =3.28) and bicycle ( =3.11) for the transportation of agricultural produce in the study area. The result on the perceived effect of the use of road transportation on agricultural marketing revealed a grand mean of 3.31 affirming that road transportation modes had positive effect on marketing of agricultural produce in the study area. The result equally revealed that the constraints associated to the use of road transportation in the marketing of agricultural produce were bad roads (81.1%), high cost of transportation (80.0%), illiteracy (72.8%) and perishability of agro-produce (55.0%). The result for hypothesis one showed that coefficients of age (5%), marital status (5%), education (1%), household size (1%), farm size (1%) and income (1%) were the determinants of the extent of use of modes of transportation in the study area. The result of hypothesis two revealed that use of road transportation modes had positive and significant influence on agricultural marketing at 1% alpha level. The study concluded that the extent of use of modes of transportation was an influential factor in the marketability of agricultural products. The study recommended that motorable roads should be constructed between farm gates and markets to enable easy access to the markets.