Marketing Information System in Citrus Fruit Pricing: A Case Study of Lattakia, Syria

Abstract

This study focuses on the field of citrus markets in the Lattakia region, the Syrian Arab Republic. Despite the high impact of citrus production on the livelihood of more than 40,000 families in the region, citrus farmers are not informed about expected prices and market trends. This information is crucial to making successful business decisions. The main aim of the paper is the assessment of Lattakia market price dynamics and to verify the use of regression and OLS models as tools of an Agricultural Marketing Information System (AMIS) for citrus price forecasting in the Lattakia region. To this end, five indicators were applied to the data set and two models for citrus wholesale price prediction on the Lattakia markets were tested in the paper. These indicators and models were applied to empirical data, obtained from an actual Marketing Information System in the Lattakia Region. The results showed high volatility in the prices between the markets and over different months and the regression model with an index of determination R² = 0.90 was identified as suitable for seasonal price predictions (short term forecasting), while the least square method was a good tool for annual price prediction (long term).

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5p286