As a country develops, more of its consuming population lose touch with the village and food producers. Thus more specialized marketing
services are needed.
Farm produce must be collected, packed and transported in good condition to the cities and distributed to retailers near consumers’ homes.
This also calls for grading and storage of the product. The more developed the country becomes; the greater is the variety of products that can be economically produced. All this must be provided at a cost that consumers can afford.
Many developing countries do not have refrigeration as a factor in their storage, either during transport, retail or consumer household stages. For this reason, poultry meat is purchased live, and slaughtered immediately before consumption.
Also, eggs are often retailed with a means for the buyer to check their quality before buying, either by “candling” (to see the internal quality with a lantern or battery-torch) or a bucket of water (to test the egg’s age by the floatation method).
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Both methods essentially test for the size of the air-cell situated at the blunt end of the egg, which increases in size as moisture is lost from the egg. With a bigger aircell, there is more floatation.
In developing countries, transport of eggs and poultry from the village to the city usually begins with a purchase by a middleman dealer, direct from the household, or from small locally held weekly markets.
Baskets with layers of straw protect the eggs from breakage, and other types of baskets are used to carry live birds. Bullock carts are still used in many countries for transport of both live poultry and eggs to larger community centres.
The roofs of buses or trains replace these slower vehicles as transport systems develop. Marketing quality considerations for live birds are usually concerned with weight loss in the bird from dehydration during transport. These are easily resolved by providing drinking water during the trip, and travelling during the cool part of the day when possible.
Improved marketing programmes must add no more cost to the product than the consumer can afford. Important marketing improvements can often be simply made by making small corrections to already existing handling, transport, packaging, grading and storage methods.
Marketing organisations generally come into being very gradually, and must be appropriate for the background, character and education of the people concerned. Plans for radical changes, which do not take sufficient account of social and economic environments, are likely to fail. Thus any improvement programme should be designed to achieve desirable modifications in existing commercial facilities (and their economic and legal framework) by a process of steady growth.
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