Fish Farming Land Allocation in Northern Part of Bangladesh: Exploring Causes across the Farm Sizes

Abstract

The research was conducted to find out the decision-making quantitative and qualitative variables that devise the different types of farmers’ involvement in freshwater fish farming in Bangladesh. Combinations of the participatory, qualitative and quantitative methods were used for primary data collection. Researchers considered 29 explanatory variables under the category of economic, socio-economic, institution, ecology, and geography to find out the appropriate causes of increasing or decreasing the fish land ratio. Ten variables were selected for the regression model after applying two multi-collinearity detection methods. Regression model shows that five economic factors (Crop and fish labor requirement, availability of cereal food, least crop area and availability of feed), and one geographical factor (distance of extension office) have a significant effect on making the decision of fish land use. Among the significant factors, fish feed availability plays the vital role to make the decision of freshwater fish farming in Bangladesh.