Technologies Intervention to Reduce Rice Post Harvest Loses in Bangladesh

Abstract

The use of technologies in the reduction of post-harvest losses of rice at farm level is advocated in this paper. The research discusses the conditions under which producers can benefit (e.g, minimizing the losses, ensuring quality, reducing gender inequality, time & labor saving etc) from technological innovations and to identify the gaps and opportunities to address the post-harvest based technology needs in the improvement of post-harvest loses and reducing the drudgery. In post-harvest activities the quality of the harvested crop, the degree of losses incurred and the efficiency of the operations and hence, overall costs are affected by factors related to the respondents age, education, family size, occupation, cropping area, institutional access to credit, the way of handling by male & female and the technology used. Purposive sampling technique was used to obtain data from 270 Bangladeshi Rice farmers. To estimate the casual impact of technology adoption propensity score matching methods and probit model is utilized to assess the results robustness that estimate the true welfare effect of technology adoption by controlling for the role on production and adoption decisions. Results show that adoption of improved technology gives higher returns to the farmers (5.62%) than the traditional farmers, though the former is more capital intensive than the latter. Quantity of operated area and access to credit are the two most important factors that contribute to adoption. With increasing Dependency Ratio and Cost of mechanical power, farmers tend to adopt less. The overall result from this paper generally confirms the potential direct role of Post-Harvest technology adoption on improving rural household welfare, as higher production tends to higher incomes.