Agroam Releases New Price Checker Tool to Help Farmers In Developing Countries

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - June 28, 2013 - PRLog -- In the developing world, agriculture continues to be the backbone of local economies – providing everything from employment opportunities for locals, to the coffee at your local shop. However, in many countries, a middleman system operates in which farmers rely on brokers to sell their produce to local and international markets or factories for processing. For farmers, this can mean losing out on up to 90% of the fair market value of their products, and perpetuating the poverty that exists in many rural communities.

A new Cape Town based start-up, Agroam, hopes to change all this. Today Agroam released its latest update to its agricultural trading platform with new tools to help farmers sell their products. It's price checker tool can be found on its homepage at www.agroam.org. Users select a crop, and an estimated cost is returned in the users local currency.

“A lot of the problems in the current agricultural supply chain are structural, and will take years to fix”, states Agroam's founder and CEO, Anthony. “But providing a baseline price for products helps increase peoples bargaining power, so that if they have to rely on a middleman, they're more empowered to make an informed deal. It's one small step in the right direction.”

Agroam's latest tool uses crowd-sourcing technology, meaning their prices will reflect those found at the local level. “Our prices might be off by a factor of 10 or 20% to begin with, but we're okay with this, since our technology takes into account the interaction of our members – when they conduct trades online – to tighten up this level of certainty. The more people we have using our system, the better quality information we can provide to our users – and we do all this for free”.

Going forward, Agroam hopes to make its system even more accessible to users. While internet penetration rates are on the rise globally, cell phones are still the preferred form of sharing information around the world. Agroam plans on delivering this information to its users via SMS by early next month.

More information can be found at www.agroam.org or by contacting contact@agroam.org directly.