Development of hill farming in Nepal : with special reference to Tanahu District
Date
1977
Authors
Mathema, Sudarshan Bhakta
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Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
There is an economic imbalance and socio-economic disparity
between the Hills and the Tarai (the plains). The majority of the Hill
farmers of the country are operating at a minimum subsistence level due
to increasing population, decreasing size of land holdings, soil erosion
and deforestation. Under such conditions it was considered worthwhile
to undertake a study aimed at exploring the possibility of increasing
Hill farmers' income by the reallocation of available resources.
This study attempts to explore the possibilities for maximizing
incomes of Hill farmers within the limits of the available resources.
Feasible profit maximizing farm plans are presented in the hope that
this will indicate the extent to which there is economic and technical
'slack' on the Hill farms and potential for raising the standard of
living. The analytical technique employed is linear programming.
The optimal farm plans show that the selected farmers in the
study are allocating their resources close to the optimal in the existing
situation. However, it is possible to increase the incomes of these
farmers by provision of additional resources. Inadequacy of cash to
adopt optimal farm plans suggests the key role of production credit.
Credit availability had a bigger impact on increasing farm incomes than
resource reallocation per se. This was examined via parametric programming.
On the basis of the findings, specific recommendations are
made. Major objectives of national planning in Nepal are to achieve
national self-sufficiency in agricultural production and to improve the standard of living of small farmers. To meet these objectives, the
financial institutions must give some priority to small farmers.
The main object of the thesis is to demonstrate the use of
LP as a farm planning technique under peasant farming situations. The
direction in which efforts to extend the applicability of similar
studies on a wider sample of Hill farms would provide policy guidelines
that would be of great practical value. Simple budgeting and gross
margin analysis will still be important in the majority of farm situations
but given the availability of computer facilities, reliable and adequate
data, the linear programming technique is a more useful and efficient
technique.
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Thesis (Masters sub-thesis)
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Open Access
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