Identify and Evaluate Factors Affecting Good Agriculture Practice Farmers to Sell Their Products Directly in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Diffusion of information communication technologies in remote areas of Sri Lanka is playing an important role for the improvement of agriculture activities. Today it can be emphasized that technology is becoming affordable in Sri Lanka and people who wish to acquire it can do so including low income segment of farmers. Farmers can communicate using these devices to get a good price for their produce from buyers on real time basis. Mobile service providers provide smartphones with bundled tariff packages to the customers where one can pay the monthly bill with commitments for a defined period as instalrnents. Few mobile based information dissemination systems (Mobile Apps) are available in Sri Lanka. The mechanism proposed in this research is to make sure best market price for farmers with the use of existing and advancing K'T applications. The main objectives of this study were to 1.) Identify the factors hindering the GAP farmers to sell their products directly. 2.) Evaluate most significant factors which are affecting the direct sale. 3.) Suggest a solution to facilitate GAP farmers to sell produce directly in the market, focusing on factors that affect by analysing the results arising from the survey. Literature review based on the investment capacity 0' farmers, literacy levels, access to market information, finding buyers, technology usage in rural ~~ area and awareness of farmers to avoid the difficulties that would be enco ntered by the farmers possibly with market players like so-called middleman. The expected plan under the proposal is to obtain the information of their produces from GA farmers using quantitative research method, to analyse the data collected and to decide a reasonable price for the produce