Hides and skins are the byproducts after animals are slaughtered for meat
consumption or killed. They have wide importance specially used as a
source foreign currency of the leather industry to Ethiopia. On the other
hand, these products are not utilized efficiently due to production of low
quality products and problem of the market. The objectives of the present
study are to describe the structure of the existing market chains, assess the
presence and reasons of hides and skins that do not enter the formal market
and assess hide and skin market price and price determinants, assess hide
and skin management practices before selling. A questionnaire survey was
conducted in Shashemene woreda starting from December 2013 to March
2014. The production, methods of preservation, markets and quality
deterioration factors on hides and skins were studied by interviewing 99
individual households from 8 kebeles of the woreda, 40 butchers, 7
middlemen, all the 3 collection centers and 2 key informants using random
sampling. The data were entered to excel spread sheet and descriptive
statistics were used for analysis. Most producers in the study area sell their
hides and skins after slaughtering their animals. Results indicated that 82%
of households sell their products to middlemen who inturn sell to
collection centers, 18% of them sell directly to collection centers and the
final destinations are tanneries who then supply the processed or semi
processed products to domestic markets or export them. As obvious the
marketing prices are increasing from producers to traders. Traders in the
study area were not grading the products they simply collect by seeing only
visible defects. Analysis on curing methods indicated that most
middlemen and all collection centers preserve hides and skins until sale.
But most traders complained that they got their products rejected one or
another time and or price lowered. The major reasons were knife cuts, foul
odor of the products, small size and discoloration of hides and skins due to
improper preservation. Therefore, producers in the study area should get
training on factors causing low quality products on the live animal and also
after slaughter and traders should be trained about proper preservation
methods and grading of products.