Abstract

James Oganiru, Isaac Makinwa, Precious Okon

The business of palm oil in Nigeria has undergone successive marketing arrangements, each with its
inherent deficiencies. The paper examined the structure, conduct and performance of palm oil marking
in Cross River State, Nigeria. The study adopted the multi-stage sampling techniques in the selection of
6 local Government Areas, 18 Villages, 180 processes, 90 commissioned agents, 90 retailers and 30
merchants for the study. The descriptive statistics, the Gini-co-efficient combined with the Lorenz curve
was used to determined the degree of market concentration among the participates; the marking
margin analysis was employed to measure the performance of palm oil marketing in Cross River State.
The result reveals that the Gini Value for processors, commissioned agents, Merchants and retailers
was 59, 54, 65 and 32% respectively. The over all performance of the market was 41.43%, while the
processors received 37.17% of the market share, while merchant 29%, retailers 26% and commissioned
agent 7.8%. Generally, the market was observed to be a pure market competition as no individual trader
has market power to influence the market prices. The paper recommended that more research should
be conducted to improve the reddish colour of hybrid palm oil to avoid marketer adding colour
substances to the palm oil in attempt to improve the colour to attract customers.