PROFITABILITY, PRODUCTIVITY AND MARKETING OF FISH IN DANG DISTRICT OF LUMBINI PROVINCE, NEPAL

Abstract

Fish is the rich source of various essential nutrients for wellbeing of human physical and mental health. Production of fish is one of the major enterprises preferred by farmers in Dang valley due to its suitability, profitability and higher market demand. Both of the lower and upper valleys of Dang district are considered to be feasible for high scale fish production. But due to lack of research works on production, productivity, profitability and marketing channels the potentiality is not explored at its utmost level. So, this research was aimed to assess the production, productivity and profitability in a comparative way using independent t test. For this study, two municipalities of each domain i.e., Lamahi municipality and Gadawa rural municipality of lower and Tulsipur and Ghorahi sub-metropolitan municipalities of upper dang valley were selected purposively. Pre tested semi-structured questionnaires were used for face-to-face interview with 27 and 23 randomly selected households (total samples n=50) of lower and upper valley respectively. Collected data was coded and required results such as socio-economic and demographic characteristics, profitability, BC ratio, production function analysis and problem indexing were obtained with the help of statistical software SPSS version 26 and MS-Excel. The average productivity and BC ratio of farms was estimated to be 10.65 tons-1 ha and 2.12 in the study area. The cost of production per Kg of fish was found to be NRs 244.78 with average selling price of NRs 300.06. Increase in fingerling and feed expenditure each by 1% would significantly increase the income by 0.830% and 0.329% respectively. Similarly, expenditure on organic manure, chemical fertilizers and medicine when increased by unit percentage would increase the income by 0.084%, 0.015% and 0.011% respectively. The return of scale was found to be 0.028 representing decreasing rate of return. The lower productivity of farms is due to incidences of diseases and parasites, lack of technical know-how, lack of quality fingerlings, inadequate availability of manures and fertilizers and seasonal labor force. Lower farmgate price, unhealthy competition with Indian fish products, higher price gap between producers and consumers, long and lack of safe transportation are the issues causing detrimental effects during marketing of the fresh fishes in the study area.