Abstract
Potato is one of the most important food crops in India. Potato is also one of the principal cash crop, it gives handsome returns to the farmers. West Bengal is a state in India where potato is one of the major agricultural crops. But potato markets are more volatile due to fluctuation in production rather than Stable. So price of potato is fluctuating in nature. Thus, the time series analysis and price forecast may help producers in acreage allocation and timing of sale of potato. The present study was conducted to know the statistical investigation of price behaviour of potato in Hooghly district of West Bengal. In the present study, Box-Jenkins Seasonal Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) modeling is deployed in forecasting of monthly average price of potato in Hooghly of West Bengal up to October 2020 based on data from November 2008 to October 2018 (a period of 120 months). Seasonal indices calculated showed that generally the price is low from January to April and it starts picking up from May and reaches the maximum in November. The best model has been selected based on the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC), Root Means Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and highest R-Square. The estimated best SARIMA model is (1,1,0)(4,1,0)12. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and BIC for Hooghly district are 184.10, 19.08, 118.98 and 10.69 respectively. Short term forecasts based on this model are close to the observed values and the behaviour of forecasted price of potato truly reflected the actual price as well as market tendency.
Highlights
Potato is one of the principal cash crops, it gives handsome returns to the farmers due to its wide market demand nationally and internationally for different kinds of utilization. It has been reported by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and International Potato Centre (IPC), India is likely to have the highest growth rate of potato production and productivity during 1993 to 2020
The descriptive statistics like maximum price, minimum price, mean price, of the time series of monthly average price of potato in Hooghly has been found as Rs.1836.67 per quintal, Rs.230.19 per quintal, Rs.872.09 per quintal respectively
Seasonality in a time series is a regular pattern of changes that repeats over S time periods, where S defines the number of time periods until the pattern repeats again
Summary
Potato is one of the principal cash crops, it gives handsome returns to the farmers due to its wide market demand nationally and internationally for different kinds of utilization. It has been reported by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and International Potato Centre (IPC), India is likely to have the highest growth rate of potato production and productivity during 1993 to 2020. The states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh accounted for more than 80 per cent share in total production (https://agmarknet.gov.in/Others/profile-potato.pdf). Uttar Pradesh (155.43 million tonnes) and West Bengal (110.53 million tonnes) ranks first and second respectively during 2016-17 followed by Bihar and Gujarat
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