Cold Storage Accessibility and Agricultural Production by Smallholders

Production of high value horticulture crops like fruits, vegetables etc. tend to benefit the farming community more than the production food crops. Availability of infrastructure like cold storage at the production and/or market yard helps to encourage them transform their crop pattern toward these high value crops. In Assam, a North-Eastern state in India where a marked production of such high value crops has been registered during the decade 2001-02 to 2010-11 has also been seen from a no cold storage capacity to a creation of 1,09,540.9 MT capacity in the same period. In this backdrop the present work empirically tries to see whether there remains any compatibility between cold storage capacity and growth and transformation of agricultural production in the state. In the study, simple tabular analysis has been followed using mean, variance, percentages etc for analyzing the data. According to the study, the cold storage is not instrumental for the smallholders and instead other facilities like transportation and market arrangement has bearing on growth in agriculture production and shift to high value horticulture crops.