ATTITUDE OF THE MAIZE FARMERS TOWARDS VALUE CHAIN

Abstract

The main purpose of the study was to determine the attitude of maize farmers towards value chain. Data were collected from 94 randomly selected farmers out of 750 maize farmers of Joldhaka upazila under Nilphamari district during 13 March, 2017 to 25 April, 2017, through personal interview. Simple and direct questions with different scales were used to obtain information. Co-efficient of correlation (r) was computed in order to explore the relationships between the maize farmers’ attitude towards value chain project and their eight selected characteristics. Slightly more than four-fifths percent (81.9 percent) of the total sampled farmers had moderately favorable attitude towards access to backward linkage. Overall more than four-fifths (83.0 percent) of the total respondents had moderately favorable attitude towards access to forward linkage. Overall more than threefifths (62.8 percent) of the total respondents had moderately favorable attitude towards maize value chain project while 19.1 percent having slightly favorable attitude and 18.1 percent fell in the highly favorable attitude category. Correlation analyses indicated that among eight selected characteristics education, family income, organizational participation and training received had positive significant relationships with their attitude towards value chain project while family size had significant negative relationship. However, age, farm size and savings of the farmers had no significant relationships with their attitude towards value chain project. ‘Training is not enough on production technologies and marketing which is provided by privet company’ (91.49 percent) emerged as the most important problem opined by the farmers. ‘Distance buyers are not coming due to fewer amounts of products’ was the least problems as opined by the farmers (69.15 percent). The foremost (85.11 percent) suggestion cited by the farmers was ‘Private company should provide training as per farmers demand’. ‘Should organize the farmers to aggregate the products as per buyers demand’ is the last ranked suggestion given by the farmers (61.11 percent).