Forecasting of Rice Production in North-East states of India

Abstract

Rice is one of the most important food crops of India in terms of area, production and consumer preference. India is the second largest producer and consumer of rice in the world. Trends in global rice consumption largely follow those in global production, rising steadily over the last few decades. However population growth has outpaced growth in rice production, such that per capita production, and thus per capita consumption is declining. For future planning, it is therefore necessary to evaluate the growth pattern of rice production. An attempt has been taken in this paper to forecast (through Box-Jenkins technique) the production of rice in North-East states of India. The study finds that the respective models for best forecasting of Rice production are ARIMA (1,1,0) for Assam, ARIMA (1,0,1) for Arunachal Pradesh, ARIMA (1,1,2) for Nagaland, and ARIMA(1,0,0) for Sikkim. This study also finds that Forecasting for Mizoram is not possible under the present methodology since the data series is non-stationary and they are not becoming stationary even after second difference. Similarly forecasting of rice production of Tripura and Meghalaya is also not viable. The data series are I(1), but in the first differenced series there is no significant spike in ACFs, indicating that the first differenced series are white noise. Moreover forecasting indicates possibility of a decline in rice production in most of the states in North East India.