1. Introduction
1.1. Agricultural Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa
Despite depending on agriculture for food security, majority of agricultural markets in African countries are inefficient and poorly integrated. Christensen and Erickson (1989) maintains that the vagaries of weather, poor infrastructure and
information asymmetry cause existing agricultural markets in Africa to be less competitive.
The approach to use market integration to measure marketing efficiency is based on the concept by Bressler and King (1970) that an efficient commodity market will establish prices that are interrelated spatially by transaction and transfer costs and inter-temporally by storage costs. If a market is integrated, there will be a low spatial and inter-temporal variation in prices implying that commodity market prices will be functionally related. Among the factors that determine market efficiency is the prevailing market structure with market efficiency likely to be high in a competitive market than in those that are less competitive. The ideal market structure for optimal market efficiency is pure competition, ceteris paribus. The supply of pineapple to consumer markets is seasonal because of their growth and climatic requirement. The problem of assemblage and perishability of the fruit has resulted in relatively few market actors at the wholesale levels, as opposed to existence of a large number of pineapple buyers at the retail levels.Thus, increasing the number of market actors is likely to elicit competition.