Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Hessaraghatta, Bangalore 560 089, Email: srinivas@iihr.ernet.in
The authors are grateful to the Division of Horticulture, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) for providing financial assistance for conducting this study under the ICAR Network Project on ‘ Marketing and Assessment of Post-harvest Losses in Fruits and Vegetables in India' and to Director, IIHR, Bangalore, for providing the facilities to carry out this research work. The guidance of Dr K.V. Subrahmanyam, the Principal Investigator, in the initial stages of the project is gratefully acknowledged. They are thankful to Ms Roopa and Sri Govinda Raju, Research Fellows for providing assistance in data collection and tabulation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments made by the anonymous referee in revising the paper.
The explicit evaluation of the post-harvest losses at different stages of marketing and their impact on farmers' net price, marketing costs, margins and efficiency have been presented. It has been found that the existing methods tend to overstate the farmers' net price and marketing margins of intermediaries. In fact, the margin of the retailers' after taking into account the physical loss during retailing has been found to be negative (loss), which otherwise, was positive (profit) in the conventional estimation. Similarly, the producers' net share and wholesalers' margins also decrease substantially. It has been shown that marketing efficiency is inversely proportional to the marketing losses. The co-operative marketing has been found to be a more efficient system in terms of both operations and price. Marketing cost has been identified as the major constraint in the wholesale marketing channel and bringing down the costs, particularly the commission charges as demonstrated in the co-operative channel, will help in reducing the price-spread and increasing the producers' margin. The need for specialized transport vehicles for perishable commodities has been highlighted.
