Impacts of Food Loss on the Cost of Cultivation: A Study on Agriculture Commodities of India

Abstract

India is the respectable producer of most of the food grains in the world despite such a large production we are the 102 nd rank in global hunger index 2019 and one of the most starving nations of the world. For a country like India production is not a problem anymore but the food available for human consumption is the problem as there is a huge amount of food loss in the marketing chain [1,2,3]. India losses a large amount of its production in post-harvest activities due to under established supply chains and poor infrastructure. So, this paper studies the effect of post-harvest losses on the cost of food production in the long-terms both empirically (Simple regression analysis) and theoretically (law of Scarcity by Lionel Robbins) from 1997 to 2017 and unravels that they are positively correlated i.e., post-harvest losses are one of major determining factor for actual price hike in the cost of cultivation of major agriculture commodities in India.