Farmers’ Perception of The Importance of Information and Communication Technology Applications during The Spread of The New Corona Epidemic in Making Productive and Marketing Decisions in Alexandria Governorate

This study aims to investigate farmers’ perception of the importance of applying information and communication technology (ICT) in productive and marketing decision during Corona virus pandemic, through a descriptive study of a random sample represented by farmers from board members of the agricultural cooperative societies, who are responsible for making information available to farmers and helping them to taking rational production and marketing decisions that reduce the severity of the risks and secure them with stable contractual cultivations, thus identifying the relationships with statistical significance between the extent of awareness of the importance of applying ICT in making productive and marketing decisions and the independent personal variables of the respondents, as well as identifying obstacles to ICT applications, And their proposals to create avenues towards ICT applications and contact agricultural cooperative societies. The research results showed that the majority of the respondents ‘farmers (82.3%) had a medium and high level of perception regarding the importance of applying ICT during the spread of the Corona virus pandemic in making productive and marketing decisions and the results indicated a significant correlation between the degree of respondents’ perception of the importance of applaying ICT during the spread of Corona virus pandemic in making productive and marketing decisions, age and land holding capacity variables, at the probability level (0.05), and the relationship was a direct correlation between the dependent variable: the variable of educational level of researcher, exposure to agricultural information sources, and the total annual income of the researcher, The degree of renewal, and respondent knowledge related to Corona virus epidemic at the probability level (0.01). The significance of the effect of each of the following independent variables was revealed: the educational level, exposure to agricultural information sources, the total annual income of the respondent, the degree of regeneration, and the knowledge of the respondent related to the epidemic Corona virus pandemic, at a level of significance (0.01) based on the calculated value of (T), where its value (4.28, 4.21, 3.23, 3.02, 4.12) respectively, in addition to these variables contribute to the interpretation of about (74%) of the changes in the degree of respondents’ farmers’ perception of the importance of applaying ICT in taking Productive and marketing decisions based on the value of the identification factor (R2) as it reached (0.716), and the most important obstacles that prevented ICT applications from the viewpoint of the respondents according to the percentages mentioned are: the absence of electronic links with the departments of the Ministry of Agriculture, the high cost of programs and hardware needed for applaying ICT, the absence of electronic applications linking agricultural societies and merchants, the lack of human cadres trained in the use of ICT, the weakness of the Internet in rural villages, the lack of confidence in the protection of data and electronic information, the poor educational level of farmers.