Factors influencing commercialisation among smallholder cabbage farmers of the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality of South Africa

Abstract

Literature suggests that there are high levels of commercialisation by even the poorest and smallest landholders within the horticulture subsector in most rural Africa. Thus, the notion of poor commercialisation among smallholder farmers is now being challenged. Against this background,this paper estimated factors that influence commercialisation by smallholder cabbage farmers in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The study used a cross-sectional survey of120 smallholder cabbage farmers obtained through a multistage sampling procedure. A Cragg double-hurdle model was applied to analyse the factors that influence the commercialisation decision and intensity of commercialisation. In the first stage, the result of the probit regression model revealed that gender, age, access to informal credit and area planted were significant factors towards influencing smallholder cabbage farmers’ commercialisation decisions. In the second stage, the results of the truncated regression model revealed that family size and area planted were the key factors determining the intensity of commercialisation. Hence, the attempts to improve smallholder farmers’ cabbage commercialisation should be guided by these significant explanatory variables in the study area, given the low commercialisation index revealed.