Abstract:
Consumption of organic food and agricultural products have been expanded
remarkably in the recent past and the terms like ‘organic agriculture / products’,
in general, and ‘organic fertilizer’ that in particularly in use to demarcate one of
the key inputs utilized in such systems become increasingly popular. On the
understanding that positive changes to the perceptions of stakeholders along the
agri-food values chains generate such trends and a mindset, this study was
focused on investigating the promotional instruments of organic fertilizer
preferred by key stakeholders in specifically fruits and vegetables production
value chain in Sri Lanka. Multiple approaches was operated to gather both
primary and secondary data by way of Review of Literature, Focus Group
Discussions and Key-Informant Interviews where a structured questionnaire based personal interview-oriented stakeholder survey was carried out with over
140 individuals attached to organic fertilizer oriented agri-food value chains. The
responses of whom were captured by setting a set of objective statements and
each respondent was directed to score on them using 10-point likert-scale. The
values provided on this scale were subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis
techniques to test for their ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ and the outcome was used to
derive Mean Attitude Score (MAS). Exploratory Factor Analysis shows that those
instruments can be catalogued objectively under four attributes, termed as: ‘Self’,
‘Market’, ‘Government’ and ‘Judiciary’. The outcome of Kruskal Wallis test
revealed that at least those preferences of one stakeholder type is different from
others. The outcome of the whole study provides insights as to how an
appropriate policy environment with right instruments can be formulated to
promote organic agriculture, where the majority of stakeholders highly
preferred ‘Government Intervention’ to regulate followed by other institutions to
facilitate such efforts.
