Development of an effective agriculture marketing systemin Bangladesh

Abstract

Agriculture is an information intensive industry. This project deals with the marketing process of agro products of Bangladesh where the farmers live in the rural areas and they struggle to earn their living in spite of their dawn to dusk hard work. After the harvest, the limited access to the market information, the undeveloped transportation system, political insecurity, middle man, financial instability and the lack of courage to take risks makes it difficult for the farmers to ensure the delivery of the produce to the markets. The lack of knowledge and scope of storage of products, also create disadvantages to the farmers. It puts them in a situation where the farmers found no option but to sell the products to the middle men who have better access to the distribution facility at a very lower price. Hence, this project aims to ensure fair price to the farming community by devising new techniques and by making use of online market. This project focuses on an application that serves as a platform for movement of agricultural products from the farms or distribution house to the consumers or retailers. The developed application provides privilege for both farmers and consumers to buy and sell the required farm products without the involvement of a middleman at its right profitable price. An Android based application is developed for this purchase providing a wide range of agro market where farmers/producers or representatives can explore their agro products to the targeted consumers/customers through an easy and scalable online market that makes all the available farm products easily accessible and provides freedom of pricing and freedom of access by sellers. For sellers, the application provide necessary option such as product upload, quantity and price update, create offer to customers, etc. In this work, an Android application is developed using Android Studio which includes Java, XML, SQLite, etc. This Android apps has different roles for buyers and sellers. In addition, a web based application is developed for the authority using PHP MVC Framework and MySQL for database. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) based messaging system is used to transmit notification to end users. The developed applications successfully met the initial requirements. As future work, full online payment can be implemented to the developed system.