Alexander Kandakov, Bohumil Havrland
Abstract
The vegetable production is one of the few agricultural profit-generating sectors based on cash crop growing and marketing.
Its tomato sector of the Republic of Moldova has a huge potential to become an important income generator within the national economy.
It is obvious that the success of this sector development depends on an efficient marketing system and access to information sources
in Moldovan rural areas. The lack of information on tomato markets is a major problem for the Moldovan tomato producers thereby
limiting their ability to profitably access new markets. The situation is particularly acute for farmers who reside in rural
areas where the information flow is much slower and less reliable once it reaches the farmer. Most of producers and processors
lack even basic information on fundamental issues like the market demand on product quantities and quality parameters, towards
which markets they should address and what distribution channels choose. Usually they do not know who and where their competitors
are and how to compete with them. The paper reports the Moldovan tomato market analysis that was done using the Agricultural
Marketing Information Systém (AMIS). The AMIS is a support tool for agricultural (including tomato) and food product market
assessment and access to the information on commodity markets by main producers, production inputs and marketing services in the Republic of Moldova.
Key words:
The Republic of Moldova; Agricultural Marketing Information System; tomato market; market trends; database