Author(s):

Naveed Hamid, Jyoti Kachroo, Anil Bhat and Quadri Javeed Ahmad Peer

Abstract:
The research was conducted in district Pulwama of Kashmir region. Ten villages from the district were selected on the basis of highest saffron grown area. Then from each village samples of farmers, commission agents, wholesalers and retailers were randomly selected, so as to constitute a total sample size of 95 which comprised of 50 farmers/growers, 15 wholesalers, 20 retailers and 10 agents. Secondary data was collected from various published sources such as bulletins of the Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Govt. of India, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Govt. of Jammu and Kashmir and Primary data regarding saffron crop was done by interviewing the saffron farmers, retailers and wholesalers with the specially structured schedules and by visiting growers, various markets and contacting various intermediaries involved in marketing of saffron crop. In India almost entire production of saffron comes from the valley of Kashmir. Although, in terms India ranks second after the Iran in terms of area and production, but ranks fifth in terms of productivity among the top seven saffron producing countries of the world. It has also been observed that in Kashmir valley production as well as area under saffron cultivation has shrunk over the past few years causing a setback to this important activity. Some of the major causes responsible for low productivity are primarily attributed to lack of proper irrigation facilities and traditional unscientific methods of cultivation. Compound growth rate of area, production and productivity had shown a declining trend during the last fourteen years due to conversion of saffron land for commercial purposes. Apart from using Acharya’s technique for analyzing the marketing cost, marketing margins and price spread, Shepherds’ index was used for computing the marketing efficiency. The study revealed that the maximum marketing, margins were grabbed by intermediaries (retailers & agents) followed by wholesalers leaving saffron growers with an unfair margin. The chain actors who usually performed the task of grading, picking, sorting etc incurred maximum marketing cost in both the channels. The results also revealed that the producer’s share in consumer’s rupee was more in channel-I as compared to the Channel-II of the sample area. The study revealed that there was considerable scope to increase the producers share in the consumers rupee if the number of intermediaries is reduced & the government intervenes pro-actively in order to organize saffron organized markets and by framing the farmer’s clubs and unions so that the farmer use these unions as profitable channels to sell their produce.

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