By TIM ARANGO

Reuters, the financial reporting service, is reaching out to a new clientele: farmers in the developing world, where price information is stubbornly hard to compare.
If successful, the program could become a model for economists and international agencies that have long proselytized for the use of technology - in particular, the mobile phone - to burnish economic growth in places like India and sub-Saharan Africa. (Reuters is now part of Thomson Reuters.)
To that end, the company has been testing a program called Reuters Market Light for several months in Maharashtra, India’s third-largest state, about the size of Italy. The state is one of India’s prominent agricultural centers, with farmers growing onions, oranges, corn, soybeans, wheat and bananas. But the farmers’ business suffers from the difficulty of comparing prices from one market to another.
“We kind of saw that there was a clear market inefficiency,” said Mans Olof- Ors, a Reuters employee who had the idea for Market Light three years ago. “The farmer would decide which market to travel to, then would just sell to that market. So there was no competition between markets.”
Reuters has dispatched about 60 market reporters to the region to report on the going price for, say, oranges or onions, and to package the data into a text message that is sent to subscribers.
The service is signing up about 220 subscribers a day at a price of 175 rupees, or about $4.10, for three months at post offices throughout Maharashtra. (The average monthly income of a farm household is about $50, according to the Indian government.) The service has about 40,000 customers so far - a tiny portion of India’s farm population, which is in the hundreds of millions, but it proves that many farmers are hungry for more information.
Reuters has collected anecdotal evidence from farmers about how the service has influenced their decisions about crop sales. One farmer, according to Reuters, held back the sale of 30 quintals of soybeans (1 quintal equals 100 kilograms) for 15 days after noticing that prices had been rising for several days. He was able to get 400 extra rupees per quintal.
Amit Mehra, managing director of Market Light, says early data show that most subscribers are making more money from their crops. “We’ve seen that about 70 percent have benefited and changed their behavior about when to sell and when to harvest and where to sell,” he said.
Some academic research has shown that mobile phones can have a stark effect on economic growth in rural areas. Robert Jensen, an economist at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, has studied the impact of putting mobile phones in the hands of fishermen in Kerala, a southern region of India. His study found that both fishermen and consumers benefited: profits rose 8 percent while prices of fish fell 4 percent.
“We find that the addition of mobile phones reduced price dispersion and waste and increased fishermen’s profits and consumer welfare,” Mr. Jensen wrote last year in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, India has a long way to go before cellphone use catches up with that of the developed world. Last year, the agency says, there were almost 20 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 citizens. In some European countries, by contrast, there are more cellphones in use than there are people .
Among farmers in rural India, one of the biggest challenges is high illiteracy rates . In some cases, farmers rely on their children to read the text messages.
“About 80 percent to 90 percent of farmers don’t have mobile phones,” Mr. Mehra said. He wants to bring the service to other emerging markets, and says it has the potential to be “transformational” over the long term.
“The market is not there yet because mobile phone penetration is just taking off,” he said. “We need about 18 to 24 months to prove some of the biggest assumptions behind the business model.”