why is the living standard of people involved in agriculture low in Nepal ? Give any 4 reasons.
Answers
Answer:
please take your points which u feel is important
Explanation:
Nepali agriculture has not been commercialised as of yet. Farming is largely done by traditional methods, and is very labour intensive. For example USA has the half the number of farmers as Nepal, but US is the biggest producer and exporter of food, whereas Nepal is nowhere close. One reason for this is the traditional wholeseller middleman system in which Nepali agriculture system is made to operate. Legally, a Nepali farmer is not allowed to sell to anyone outside of wholesaler (though many farmers do sell outside on footpaths and carts without much reprecursions). What this leads to is wholesalers, or middlemen taking away large chunks of farmer's profits.
Another reason is there's no legal framework in Nepal for modern systems like contract farming. I don't understand why Nepal government ignores it, all it takes for them is to pass a bill.
One more reason is vast majority of farmers own very small piece of land. According to government, 52% of farmers own farmland less than 2 hectares. This is extremely small amount of lands to grow a meaningful amount of crops to sell.
Then there's an issue of infrastructure. Say I grow huge amount of apples in Jumla, which has favourable climate for growing apples. But it'll be very expensive for me to sell that apple because there are barely any roads in Jumla. Even though a straight linear distance between Jumla and Kathmandu is only 300–350km, I'll have to first go to Terai, use Mahendra Highway and travel upwards from there, drastically increasing the distance. The distance which should have been 300–400km now suddenly becomes 850 km, bigger than the entire length of Nepal. Not to mention those roads are extremely bad and there's at least a 20% chance that my produce will get spoiled. And it'll take 2 days to travel that distance because Nepal doesn't have any expressways. For comparison Sydney and Melbourne is also 850 km, but we can travel that in 8–9 hours. Not to mention they have trains, which travel freight in much larger quantities. This means that Nepali farmer will have to pay for more chemicals and transport while he is only able to transport 1 truck of goods at a time instead of more containers like Aussie or American farmer.
Lastly, Indian government hugely subsidises it's farmers. Indian farmers get free electricity, free water etc. While this might be good for Indian farmers, it means that Nepalese farmer is heavily outcompeted in terms of price because Nepali farmer doesn't get free electricity or water. Because of this Nepal is heavily reliant on India for food even though 17% of Nepal lies in Ganga plains, which is the most fertile land on Earth. One way to stop this is increasing tariff but because that'll lead to high inflation (i.e. mehengai), most Nepali politicians are scared to increase tariffs on agricultural products fearing it'll lead to protests and loss of votes.
Living standard of people involved in agriculture is low in nepal because of
1 lack of proper management
2 lack of capital
3 lack of proper production
4 traditional methods of farming