Description
BS Publications Agricultural Risk Management (Pb) by Prasad J Devi Et Al
About the Book “Agriculture is a profession of hope”, someone said. Man has landed on moon and has sent unmanned spacecrafts to Mars and Venus and transforming lives by fascinating technological innovations, yet he cannot shower rains at will, cannot prevent droughts or floods or even predict them with certainty. Risk and uncertainty are considered ubiquitous and varied in agriculture resulting from a range of factors including the vagaries of weather, the unpredictable nature of biological processes, the pronounced seasonality of production and market cycles etc. Weather forecasts are probabilities and projections based on improved technologies but not reachable to many small and marginal farmers. But still vast majority of the people in the country continue in farming with a hope that they would get better production and better prices. Agriculture continues to play a major role, in spite of declining share in India’s overall economy. Even today, as we entered the new millennium, the situation is still the same, with almost the entire economy being sustained by agriculture, which is the mainstay of the villages. Although agriculture contributes less than 15% of India’s GDP, its importance in the country’s’ economic, social and political fabric goes well beyond this indicator. The rural areas are still home to 75 percent of the India’s 1.2 billion people, a large number of whom are poor. Most of the rural poor depend on rain-fed agriculture and fragile forests for their livelihoods. Agricultural risk is associated with negative outcomes that stem from imperfectly predictable climatic and price variables.