Review on Challenges and Opportunities of Honey Marketing in Ethiopia

Agriculture is the major supplier of raw materials to food processing, beverage and textile industries. It accounts for more than 85% of the labor force and 90% of the export earnings. Ethiopia is endowed with variety of ecological and climatic condition. It is also home to some of the most diverse flora and fauna in Africa. The forests and woodlands of the country contain diverse plant species which is home to nectar and pollen. The beekeeping subsector has been an integral part of agriculture in Ethiopia. It has been contributing to the household income and poverty alleviation and nation al economy through export. The country has huge apicultural resources that made it the leading honey and beeswax producer in Africa. Moreover, Ethiopia is a country where apicultural research is being conducted in a coordinated manner under the national agricultural research system. This makes the country one of the largest honey producer in the continent and to rank fourth in the world in wax production. Honey is the natural sweet substance, produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants, or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature. This study was aimed at reviewing Honey production and marketing in Ethiopia, with specific objectives of reviewing the production level of honey in Ethiopia, marketing and actors in honey value chainas well as the constraints and opportunities of honey production and marketing in Ethiopia.. The data were also collected from secondary sources mainly from FAOSTAT, CSA and different published materials on Honey value chain in Ethiopia. It has been revealed that the country’s beekeeping subsector is mainly practiced using traditional basket hives with low productivity. However, attempts by various investigators and development actors showed that both the production and quality can be improved in terms of transforming the beekeeping system, processing and marketing. This review paper also tried to address both the domestic and international honey marketing and identified some of the major challenges that are obstacles to the possible maximization of benefits by producers and the whole national economy. Keywords: Beekeeping, Ethiopia, Honey, Marketing, , value chain actor