13. Market Development in the Greater Dinajpur Vegetable Sector

Client

Swisscontact

Location

Greater Dinajpur, Bangladesh

Duration

33 Months (July 2006 – March 2009)
Initial Duration:15 Months (July 2006 – September 2007)
Extended Duration: 18 Months (October 2007 – March 2009)

Status

Completed

Background

After having conducted a comprehensive sub-sector study, the project revealed several constraints like farmers having lack of awareness and knowledge about quality seeds, seed farming techniques, post-production processing and preservation, appropriate dose of fertilizers (both chemical and compost), micronutrients & pesticides, profitable crop cycle & cropping pattern. Besides, unavailability of technical know-how market linkage was also poor in the region and the service market was not operating in favor of them. The government service was not sufficient for the farmers, and the private sector mostly followed a channel that was not very useful for the famers to get the required information. Understanding the constraints, GMark designed several interventions that follow the Market Development Approach (MDA).

Intervention Areas

GMark was the first to promote plastic crates in packaging and transportation of tomato (which was the prime case for massive post harvest loss of the farmers and traders in the value chain) by facilitating traders in the local market place to use them to transport tomato from the local market to high priced market like Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet.