E-COMMERCE FOR RURAL AGRICULTURE SECTOR AND EMPOWERMENT OF FARMERS: CASE IN CAMBODIA

Abstract

Agriculture sector in Cambodia plays an important role in improving the livelihood of rural people which is about 90% of overall population. Although agriculture productivity over the years shows improvement but poverty among rural people is still high at 35% of total households. The challenges are to increase agriculture growth and generate more income opportunities. These challenges can be met through ICT and e-commerce technologies. However, e-commerce for rural agriculture sector in Cambodia cannot replicate the existing e-commerce players such as Amazon, e-Bay, Alibaba or Rakuten. Therefore, the e-commerce framework, model and features are clearly defined, to ensure the proposed system meet the distinctive characteristics of rural agriculture sector in Cambodia. The objectives of study are based on new model of e-commerce incorporating new features, Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to assess the effectiveness of proposed system and statistical analysis to measure the e-commerce success factors determining the empowerment level among farmers. The proposed system was developed to further improve the successful e-Commerce systems (case studies) in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa and China, and challenges towards sustainability. The proposed system takes into account the current ICT projects in Cambodia, and other emerging initiatives in Rural Agriculture Development (ARD). These became the basis of design, development and implementation of e-commerce for rural agriculture sector in Cambodia, referred as E-Commerce Portal System coined as AGRICambodia.com. In addition, survey was carried as part of statistical measurement of system implantation. Primary research group (respondent) comprised of fifteen (15) farmers, five (5) suppliers, and five (5) buyers. This assessment used qualitative results for both pre- and post-survey, and statistical analysis method called Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used. The system implementation shows that the system is superior in supporting ARD, comprehensively integrates the evolving e-commerce technologies and value added factors compare to existing agriculture e-commerce system. Hence, AGRICambodia.com becomes a viable e-commerce model and development enabler with significant transformation of rural farmers. Furthermore, the system implementation also shows that new desired e-commerce technologies features of AGRICambodia.com covers the extents that cannot be tailored by e-commerce players. Next, the comparison with successful agriculture e-commerce portal system again showed the unique features of AGRICambodia.com. Finally, the statistical results on the pre- and post-implementation of system, showed that AGRICambodia.com indeed helped to realise the actual need and expectation of rural farmers and other stakeholders within the system. Progressions of PoC via AGRICambodia.com have directed towards achieving the e-commerce success factors and led towards the empowerment of farmers, which is the main objective of this study.