Export Marketing Practices, Problems and Prospects of Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Union. In Ethiopia

Abstract

The livelihood of stakeholders, who produce coffee, depends on the effective exporting of this crop to the foreign market. The study was conducted on export marketing practices, problems and prospective of oromia coffee farmers cooperative union. The objective of the study is to assess the export marketing practices, problem and prospective oromia coffee farmers’ cooperative union (OCFCU) and to identify the key factors for the success of exporting coffee through cooperatives. The data were collected through semi structured questionnaire, interview and focus group discussion. The sources of the information were primary cooperatives societies that were affiliated to the union. For the study purpose, eight primary cooperative societies affiliated to the union were selected based on purposive sampling. The result of the  study also shows that the factors which influence union’s export performances  are competition, long duration of export document process, coffee quality, export barrier from country destinations, delay in transportation, communication barrier,  lack of international market knowledge,  export administrative procedures, unofficial fee in export documents processing, incapable to supply coffee in time by members, private traders intervention  and delay of shipping. The regression  model analysis revealed that,  analysis resulted in an R2 =0.293 suggesting that the six factors “cooperative-specific characteristics, export marketing strategy, competition, management commitment, export market characteristics and product characteristics” together explained 29.3 percent of the variation in the export marketing performance of oromia coffee farmers’ cooperative union  OCFCU as explanatory variables.