The myth of market price information: mobile phones and the application of economic knowledge in ICTD

Abstract

The notion that farmers use mobile phones to acquire market price information has become a kind of shorthand for the potential of this technology to empower rural, low-income populations in the Global South. We argue that the envisioned consequences of ‘market price information’ for market efficiency with benefits at all income levels is a kind of myth, one frequently promulgated in the publications of aid agencies like the World Bank, in the project reports of NGOs and by mass media outlets such as The Economist, but is also the subject of serious discussion among scholars. We show that ‘market price information’ has become a kind of boundary object recast across the expert cultures of economics, computer science, policy work and development expertise. We draw from our ethnographic work (among rural agriculturalists in China and Uganda) to offer four alternatives to this myth.

Keywords:

• mobile phones
• China
• Uganda
• agriculture
• boundary object

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For work that considers broader characterizations of ICTD’s ideology see Mazzarella (2010).

2 The contemporary notion of information goes back to the mathematical developments of ‘information theory’ and the work of mathematician Claude Shannon. Frank Webster points to efforts to quantify growth in the amount of information as a reflection of the way definitions of information have come to dispense with information as containing semantic content. It is understood instead ‘as a physical element as much as is energy or matter’ (Webster, 2006, p. 26).

3 The majority of farmers in the areas where the second author did field-work grew the same crops: wheat and corn, typically planted one after the other, followed by peanuts, sweet potatoes and some cotton. This is aligned with province-wide statistics on crops, although there is more variety in other districts. Shandong is renowned for its apples, grapes and cherries, as well as its vegetables, but these tend to be cultivated by bigger commercial entities and be more integrated in wider markets (USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, 2008). Wheat and corn are the traditional crops of Northeast China. Their prices have not fluctuated much since 2006, when the government established a ‘minimum guarantee price’ policy for wheat. This means that when the market price is lower than the minimum price fixed by the government, SINOGRAIN (the China Grain Reserve Corporation that is the implementation body for this policy) purchases farmers’ grain at the minimum guaranteed price (Li et al., 2011, pp. 97–98) This made crops like wheat very attractive for farmers who preferred to avoid risks: they planted what their neighbours were planting, they watered their fields, used pesticide or fertilizers and started works like seeding and harvesting at the same time as the rest of the village.

4 An effort by our summer intern Luisa Beck to locate as many of these market-related services as could be found turned up 216 total projects, 72 of which provided market price information. The majority (50) offer market information via SMS. Most of these (34) offered such information only in text format. See http://markets.ischool.berkeley.edu/. The most well-known services are a mixture of aid agency and private sector efforts and include Esoko (formerly TradeNet), Reuters Market Light, Mistowa (a project of USAID) and Nokia Life Tools.

5 Economist Dani Rodrik, for example, in a critique of the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate development interventions advocates for unstructured interviews to take stock of ‘local knowledge’ to arrive at explanations and to inspire new solutions (Rodrik, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1027310] titled, ‘How marginalized populations self-organize with digital tools’.

Notes on contributors

Jenna Burrell

Jenna Burrell is an Associate Professor at the School of Information, University of California-Berkeley. Her book Invisible users: Youth in the internet cafes of urban Ghana was published in 2012.

Elisa Oreglia

Elisa Oreglia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Her research is about the diffusion, appropriation and use of ICT among marginalized communities in emerging regions, in particular in China.