Marketing of Indigenous Fruits in Southern Africa - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 229

the traders who transported fruits by bus), fruit acquisition/buying, time spent
in presale activities by the retailers, and traders' marketing time. Also, retailers
bought plastic bags for packing.
Intensive consumer tasting of U. kirkiana fruits also revealed serious problems
at all trading levels. Tasting was the most serious problem reported by the
wholesale section (75% of respondents), followed by the retail (63% of
respondents) and production (50% of respondents) sections. This is because
wholesalers spread their fruits on the ground and hence made them more likely to
be tasted. In the retail section, fruits not packed in plastic bags were more
susceptible to tasting than packed ones. In the producer section, fruits piled in
buckets were tasted but not those in bags. Consumers often tasted the fruits to
make sure that they were buying sweet ones. The problem was that some
consumers tasted too much, to the extent of causing financial losses to the traders.
A problem similar in scale to fruit tasting was low sales in peak periods.
During the ripening period the traders competed for fruits and hence harvested
large quantities at the same time, a situation that caused supply to exceed
demand. Low willingness to pay might also have occurred because some
consumers acquired fruits from relatives from rural areas as gifts, or harvested
them straight from the forest during weekend visits. Other problems reported by
the traders included lack of marketing infrastructure, such as marketing sheds,
storage facilities, and traditional laws limiting the collection of the fruits for sale.
12.2.5 Marketing margins
Despite the costs described above, fruit traders generated cash and subsidized
their household incomes. In the 1999/2000 ripening season, producers of U.
kirkiana made between Z$1.73/kg in Murehwa, Z$1.78/kg in Gokwe and
Z$3.34/kg in Mbare (Table 12.1). Since Mbare market charged high prices,
producers who sold U. kirkiana fruits at Mbare received 45% of the price paid
by the consumer compared with 32% for their counterparts in Murehwa and
Gokwe. At the production and retail levels, the large number of participants
facilitated adequate competition, unlike the situation at the wholesale level. This
led to a high market concentration in the wholesaling section, a sign of market
power. Surprisingly, however, wholesalers received relatively low margins
compared with other participants in the chain, possibly as a result of the higher
costs of transport, their inability to negotiate a lower buying price and a high
selling price. Therefore, to recover some of their costs, most wholesalers sold
fruits in small quantities directly to consumers, in 1.5, 2.5 and 5 l tins.
12.3 Use of Indigenous Fruits, Management Policies and
Property Rights
Despite the financial and social benefits enjoyed by indigenous fruits traders,
rigid by-laws limiting the marketing of fruits affect the market supply. Issues of
natural resource management policies and property rights are important