Development of hill farming in Nepal : with special reference to Tanahu District

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. Show more