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Abstract
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.