Beyond Harvest: Trust Gap Behind Indonesia’s Banana Supply Chains

The research offers a practical perspective on the difficulties facing smallholders in a major banana-producing country, where fragmented trading networks and unequal access to information can weaken farmers’ bargaining power. These findings identify promising areas for support, with important limits on what the numbers can prove.

A banana farmer's working day involves more than growing healthy fruit. Buyers need clear information about harvests, payments must arrive as promised, and small producers need a meaningful place in the businesses that carry their crops to market. The study 'Relational Drivers and Technical Efficiency in Indonesian Banana Value Chains: A Multi-Actor Regression-DEA Analysis,' published in Sustainability, explores these relationships and finds that trust, commitment, information quality, and inclusion are closely associated with better coordination.

The research offers a practical perspective on the difficulties facing smallholders in a major banana-producing country, where fragmented trading networks and unequal access to information can weaken farmers' bargaining power. These findings identify promising areas for support, with important limits on what the numbers can prove.

Looking Beyond the Farm Gate

Researchers collected questionnaires during 2023–2026 in Cianjur, Lumajang, and Lampung, three Indonesian production areas with different growing conditions and trading arrangements. Of 251 respondents, 194 provided usable responses: 181 farmers, five wholesalers, and eight retailers.

The team examined farmers' assessments of competence, trust, governance, information quality, information gaps, commitment, inclusion, and coordination. Questions about coordination covered everyday concerns such as matching harvests to demand, meeting buyers' quality requirements, receiving payments on time, limiting damage, and satisfaction with prices and cooperation.

Two statistical models explored how these factors related to farmer-reported coordination and performance. A separate method called Data Envelopment Analysis compared how effectively participants translated relational and informational resources into coordination and inclusion outcomes.

Reliable Relationships Carry Real Weight

The fuller statistical model explained 63.3% of the variation in farmers' reported coordination and performance. Commitment had the largest standardized association, closely followed by inclusion and information quality, with trust making a smaller contribution.

A smaller model explained 54.4% of the variation and identified commitment and trust as its strongest predictors. Adding inclusion, information quality, and competence increased explanatory power by 8.9 percentage points, supporting the researchers' decision to treat the fuller model as their main result.

The analysis found an indirect association connecting trust with coordination through commitment, alongside trust's direct association with coordination. This pattern fits the idea that confidence in a partner and willingness to maintain the relationship belong together.

Governance quality and information quality were positively linked to trust in the reported regression tests, with the information-quality result showing less stability under resampling. Neither factor showed a statistically supported indirect connection to coordination through trust.

Farmers Face a Gap That Geography Does Not Explain

Farmers' average efficiency score was 0.683 on a scale where 1 represented the best observed performance under the model. Only six farmers, or 3.3%, reached that benchmark, suggesting considerable differences in how participants converted their reported resources into coordination outcomes.

Average scores were 0.697 in Lampung, 0.680 in Cianjur, and 0.668 in Lumajang. The regional differences were not statistically significant, and the six farmers reaching the benchmark were in Cianjur and Lumajang, despite Lampung having the highest average.

A version of the model allowing for differences in operating scale produced an average farmer score of 0.731, with average scale efficiency of 0.941. The researchers interpreted this pattern as suggesting that scale alone did not account for the efficiency gap.

Wholesalers averaged 0.954 and retailers 0.934, producing a striking descriptive contrast with farmers. These groups contained only five and eight respondents and were benchmarked against regional frontiers within their own trading tiers, making the figures unsuitable for a definitive ranking of all Indonesian farmers and traders.

A score of 0.683 does not mean farmers waste 31.7% of their bananas or could automatically cut costs by that amount. These are relative benchmarks built from the sample and the model's assumptions, with sensitivity to unusual observations.

What Better Support Could Look Like

The authors propose practical steps such as transparent prices, dependable payments, accessible dispute resolution, shared packing facilities, and stronger farmer organizations. Retailers could share demand forecasts and quality requirements, and extension services could connect farmers with peers whose practices deserve closer study.

Digital price services, traceability tools, and farmer helplines are possible ways to support these relationships, with usefulness depending on connectivity, language, digital skills, affordability, and confidence in the information provider.

The evidence comes from a deliberately selected sample linked to or aware of digital market-information platforms, and responses reflect participants' perceptions. Missing responses, limited geography, measurement weaknesses, and the tiny trader samples restrict how broadly the findings apply. Because the research captures associations rather than changes tracked over time, successful coordination could strengthen trust and commitment, and unmeasured factors could influence both.

The next research steps include following participants across seasons, testing interventions, interviewing high-performing farmers, expanding to other regions and crops, and examining how efficiency at one supply-chain stage affects another. For organizations supporting smallholders, the findings provide a grounded reason to test programs that make trading relationships more reliable, inclusive, and useful in farmers' daily work.