Browsing by Author "Wijetunga, C. S."

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    Analysis of Present Status and Production Forecasting of Potato Farming in Sri Lanka
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2019-02) Weerasinghe, L.R.; Niranjan, F.; Wijetunga, C. S.; Maduwanthi, B.C.H.
    Potato is one of the most important cash crops in the upcountry Sri Lanka where majority of farmers depend on it as their main livelihood. Despite its importance to the economy, Sri Lanka mainly depends on the importation of potato from low cost producing countries which is a huge burden to the government. Under this background, this study aims to analyze the present scenario of the potato industry in Sri Lanka with a view to forecast the potato production of future. The Box Jekins Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series model has been employed for forecasting the potato production and production data obtained from Department of Census and Statistics for the period of 1997-2017 were used. The descriptive analysis shows that self-sufficiency ratio in potato has not improved over the past few decades and there is a 5.28% import dependency. Moreover, potato importation bill has increased over the years from 1.30 billion LKR in 1997 to 5.44 billion LKR in 2017. In the meantime, 6.78% increase in cost of production over the last two decades has been resulted in farmers reluctant to continue potato farming as their livelihood. Among the inputs, seed cost contributed to the highest share of the total cost of production. In spite of that profitability of the potato farming has been increased by 7.81% (Department of Agriculture) over the years. The study also revealed that the best models are ARIMA (0, 0, 1) and ARIMA (2, 0, 0) for future forecasting. Therefore, this forecast would be useful for the policy makers to foresee the future requirement and the government to take measures to enhance the production capacity to cut the burden on country’s food import bill.
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    Economics of Selected Domestic Food Crops: A Case Study in Badulla District, 2000-2017
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2019-02) Sewwandi, I.M.B.; Wijetunga, C. S.; Rathnayake, R.M.P.S.
    Agriculture is the principal form of livelihood for substantial fraction (57.3%) of population in Badulla District (Department of Agriculture, Sri Lanka). In spite of high incidence of poverty in Badulla district, climatic conditions are favorable for cultivating of domestic food crops such as potato, tomato, pole bean, maize and capsicum which are the most leading food crops in the area. Therefore, this study aims at comparing the profitability of leading food crops in the Badulla district and to analyse the resource use efficiency of these crops for the period of 2000-2017. The Cobb- Douglas production function was applied for each crop separately to compare the resource use efficiency. The study results show that 70% of the variance in the dependent variable can be predicted from the independent variables used in the models. Among the inputs, agro chemicals, hired labor and machinery indicate negative relationship with the gross income for these selected crops. The summation of output elasticities are greater than one (1) in pole bean (Maha season 1.3524 and Yala season 1.1295) which means its production function has increasing returns to scale. This implies that increasing expenditure on resources for pole bean cultivation can help farmers to obtain higher income than their expectation. Furthermore, capsicum and tomato in Maha season also have increasing returns to scale. In addition, potato, maize and tomato in Yala season indicate decreasing returns to scale implying inability to obtain the benefits from returns to scale. Moreover, profitability analysis shows that, pole bean in Yala season and tomato in Maha season has the highest increment in the profitability compared with other domestic food crops in Badulla district. Therefore, the study suggests diverting resources from less profitable crops to high profitable crops in order to enhance the resource use efficiency and to improve the living conditions of the farmers in the area.