Abstract

GIS as a marketing tool for smallholder farmers in Ghana
Track: Agriculture
Authors: Daniel Asare-Kyei

The citrus industry is estimated to be the largest fruit industry in Ghana with over 10,000 farmers. Nearly 66% of these farmers have no reliable market for their produce due to geospatial data gap. This study aims to develop efficient GIS-based supply chain management system to help fill the data gap in Ghana's agricultural sector and contributes to poverty alleviation. Instantaneous positions of 10,000 farm boundaries were picked using Garmin GPS receivers. The ArcInfo command "Generate was used to automatically convert the GPS points to Arcinfo coverage. Unique ID was defined for both spatial and aspatial datasets and using the "spatial Join tool, the two datasets were linked to develop supply chain database. Geo-processing operations of 25km, 50km and 100km buffers were created along PFs to determine farmers who can be targeted. The results showed that the PFs can meet their annual installed-plant capacity by sourcing within a 50km radius.