Identifying and Explaining the Driving Factors of Organic Agricultural Products Market Development

The future of organic farming, as one example of sustainable agricultural approaches, largely depends on the consumer demands and their incentive to pay higher prices for their products. Therefore, by using Sequential Exploratory Strategy, the present investigation aims to identify the driving factors behind the organic market development. In the qualitative part, by content analysis of the resources and data from semi-structured interviews with 16 organic market experts, 29 proponents were identified in six main groups. Then, in the quantitative part, second order confirmatory factor analysis method was applied to confirm the identified driving factors. The statistical population was Managers, experts, producers and sellers of organic products. Using the Cochran formula and a stratified sampling with proportional allocation, 68 participants were selected. The data were collected using a questionnaire based on the results of the qualitative section and analyzed using SPSS22 and Smart PLS3 Software. The mean value of the average extracted variance (AVE) for each of the model structures was more than 0.5 and the coefficients of composite reliability (CR) were more than 0.7, which indicates the proper performance of measurement section in the model. Based on the results, the factors of culture and advertising, strengthening channels of distribution and sale, financial and credit support, inspection and supervision, educational and promotional programs and certification facilities, logo and branding are respectively the most important driving factors for the development of the organic products market.