Study of Change in Perception of the Marketing Method of Small and Medium Farmers Through AHP Analysis

Abstract

Types of agriculture risks which a farmer faces are production risk, price or market risk, financial and credit risk, institutional risk, technology risk, input price risk, post-harvest risk and personal risk (Devi Prasad Juvvadi). Input and output price volatility is an important reason for market risk in agriculture. Lower prices of the products received by farmer forces him not to completely depend on faming income. So, one cannot ask a farmer to grow more from the same area until he gets a fair price. Farmers are not getting enough price to survive on their own by marketing their products through traditional Agricultural Produce Marketing Committe (APMC )channel. National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) reported that, given the choice, 40 per cent of the farmers wish to leave agriculture (Murray, 2009), it may be a future risk to the food security of India. As a result, government has given permission to sell the products through different channels in the market. In this study, selection of appropriate channels of marketing, considering long-term relation is studied using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) tool. In this work 20 attributes (quantitative and qualitative) along with six marketing channels with a single marketoriented perspective on four groups of farmer is studied. Study is carried out on 80 farmers whose major income comes from farming. Here, different channels of marketing are ranked and how a small and medium farmer selects the appropriate marketing channel is presented. It was observed that the farmers no longer have faith in traditional means of selling their products through APMC. It can be a lesson for other small and medium farmers to change their thought procedure and use alternate marketing channels to sell their products and become sustainable in the farming profession. The deficiencies and urge of the farmer to remain in this business in a sustainable way is presented, from which policymakers can take an appropriate message from the study.