Intra-year price instability of commercial crops in india: exploring the underlying dynamism

One serious issue which creates far reaching repercussions in the commercial agriculture sector of India is the heightened instability in price both at the inter-year and intra-year level. An exploration of intra-year price instability, which is rarely addressed in the empirical studies, is attempted in this paper by selecting the case of four major commercial crops of India namely, Small Cardamom, Black Pepper, Natural Rubber and Tea. The study concludes that even in the scenario of integrated market setting price instability at the intra-year level is guided mainly by the seasonal character of supply. Hence, market offers high price to the farmers only when they have less to offer in the market and vice versa, which makes their income unstable in the short run, highlighting the need for stabilizing producers’ returns.

Intra-year instability ,

seasonality ,

co-efficient of variation ,

inter-temporal arbitraging ,

cyclical fluctuations ,