Determinants of Farmers' Welfare : A Special Reference to Kerala State

摘要

The present study was conducted in Palakkad district of Kerala state during 2017-18 to analyse the welfare of farmers practicing rice, coconut and vegetables crops in combinations. Equal number of farmers growing rice-coconut, rice-vegetable and coconut-vegetable combinations were selected. Thirty two indicators to represent the welfare were identified and subjected to categorical principal component analysis (CATPCA) to extract the factors. Eighteen indicators were grouped into eight factors based on eigen values of more than 1.00. These factors contributed for 69.16 per cent of total variation in the farmer's welfare. The factor with highest contribution (16.12%) was named as optimistic factor with four indicators viz., household annual income, farm income per acre, food security and social participation. Behavioural factor with the single indicator self acceptance had the minimum contribution (4.29 %) to farmer's welfare. Overall farmer welfare index for 90 respondents ranged in between 0.35 and0.83. Among the three combination, maximum frequency of rice-vegetable farmers (36.67 %) retained high level of farmer welfare index.