The Economic Evaluation of the Marketing Paths of Marvdasht\'s Tomato

 Tomato is one of the major vegetables in Marvdasht Township, though the marketing process of this crop has always been faced with main problems. In this research, meanwhile the identity of different marketing paths of this township's tomato – including six fresh-consumption and processing paths- economic evaluation of each mentioned path has been considered. For this purpose, different marketing margins, the share of marketing elements from the final price of crop, marketing cost coefficient and marketing efficiency have been calculated for each crop marketing path. The data are cross sectional and related to 2005 and have been gathered via 147 questionnaires (containing 5 types of questionnaires) using simple random sampling . The most important results of this study show that the processing path has the maximum amount of marketing cost and the marketing margin (Rls. 1345 and Rls. 1870 respectively). In this path, the share of producer from the price of final crop has had minimum amount and has been about a quarter. In the fresh-consumption path, while shortening the length of path, the marketing costs, the marketing margin and the sum of middlemen's share from the final price of crop (marketing cost coefficient) have been decreased and as a result, the share of producer from the final price of crop has been increased. Also, the processing path has had the maximum amount of technical efficiency (0.985) and also the total efficiency (0.265), whereas this path has had the low price efficiency (0.28). Also, in the fresh-consumption path while shortening the length of marketing path, the price efficiency and the total efficiency have been decreased, but the technical efficiency has been increased. And in general, about all marketing paths it can be expressed that the price efficiency is considerably lower than the technical efficiency, and the total marketing efficiency is also in a low level.    JEL Code: ، ، ، ، ،