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About RATIN
RATIN was developed to help reduce regional food insecurity by strengthening the ability of markets to provide access to affordable food to poor households and improve food availability through providing adequate incentives to producers. It came out of the realization that although there are households among the food insecure that are structurally poor and are heavily dependent on food donations, there are also market-dependent households who are able to purchase food if it is available at the right time, price and quantity in the local markets through enhanced effective competition.
Competition in the supply of food commodities (maize, beans, rice and cooking bananas) is enhanced by regional trade in these commodities. However, trading opportunities for most food and livestock cross-border traders are limited by the need to plan for or justify incurring certain cross-border marketing costs in the face of uncertain receipts due to lack of timely market information.
Consequently, the major task of RATIN is to supply traders with improved early warning marketing and trade information that would lead to more efficient and competitive transactions in food trade between surplus and deficit regions in East Africa. Small and medium scale cross-border traders account for over 80 percent of regional trade in maize, beans and rice in East Africa. Consequently, they are the main target group of the RATIN information.
To easily distribute RATIN information to hundreds of small and medium cross border traders of cereals and pulses in East Africa, the traders have been organized into 30 loose associations each of which receive RATIN? monthly bulletin and disseminate it to all members. Figure 1 shows the distribution of cross-border traders associations. RATIN also disseminates trade related information through TV and radio (Uganda and Kenya through partners), telephone (East Africa), newspaper (source of information for reporters), http://www.ratin.net/ website and SMS.
RATIN started as a collaborative effort comprising three USAID projects. Famine Early Warning System Network Project (FEWS NET) that focuses on bringing in the crop production and trade information; and the Regional Agricultural Trade Enhancement Support Program (RATES) that deals with changing trade policy to enhance regional trade in maize. RATIN is currently hosted by Eastern Africa Grain Council (EAGC). It is EAGCs Market Information Service. EAGCs core function is to improve the policy and trading environment in the regional grain trade, strengthen market linkages and reduce the constraints along the grain value chain.
The main activity of RATIN is regional grain trade analysis using information from various sources as shown in figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Activities of the Regional Agricultural Trade Intelligence Network (RATIN)
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