Factors affecting commercialization of smallholder farming in Assam
3rd Global Food Security, Food Safety & Sustainability Conference
May 21-22, 2018 | New York, USA

Sampurna Sharma and Nivedita Deka

Assam Agricultural University, India

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Food Process Technol

Abstract:

Commercialization is about expanding participation in markets. It is about increasing the number of crops and animal products being bound for sale. It is also about expanding factors of production being obtained from the market. Various factors influence the extent of commercialization among smallholder farmers. These factors affect commercialization by changing the conditions of output and input prices, commodity supply and demand, transaction etc. A field survey on factors affecting commercialization of smallholder agriculture was conducted in small farms in four villages in Nagaon district of Assam, India. The method of multistage stratified random sampling method for the selection of the farmers. The result revealed that level of commercialization was found to be affected by many socio-economic characteristics such as age, family size, land size, credit and market access. It was observed that the values of R2 were 0.51, 0.76 and 0.82 in case of low, medium and high level of commercialization which indicated that nearly 51%, 76% and 82% variations in all the three respective levels of commercialization were due to the effect of independent variables considered in the model revealing good predictive ability of the model. Accessibility to the market and farm size was found to be highly significant compared to other variables in all the three groups. Factors like age, family size and credit accessibility didn�??t have any significant effect on level of commercialization. It could be inferred that increase in farm size and lesser distance to the market resulted in increase in commercialization. sampurnasharma07@gmail.com