Marketing efficiency of Aloe vera medicinal plant in Thoothukudi District of Tamil Nadu State
*D. Amutha
Department of Economics St. Mary’s College (Autonomous), Thoothukudi Affiliated to Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Abishekapatti, Tirunelveli – 627012 (India) Email: amuthajoe@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
A sizeable portion of the Indian population relies on medicinal plants for both their livelihood and health security. These plants also provide a vital source of raw materials for the traditional medicine and herbal industries. The effectiveness of marketing and the impact of price variation on consumer share in the Thoothukudi district are examined in this essay. The 401 acres of aloe vera cultivation with 90 farmers in the Thoothukudi district were chosen for the study. 54 of the sample’s 90 farmers are small-scale, while the remaining 36 are large-scale. A field investigation took place in December 2022. Secondary data is gathered from a variety of official documents, academic studies, journals, libraries, magazines, books, newspapers, the internet, and various organisations. The study’s tools included trend analysis and regression coefficients. The study found that the marketing effectiveness of aloe vera is 5.27 for small farms and 6.44 for large farms. The high efficiency can be attributed to the few intermediates in the chain and their small marketing margins. Furthermore, large farms are more efficient at marketing than small farms because small farms depend on middlemen for loans and transportation. The results of the analysis show that the regression coefficients are favourable and statistically significant at the 5% level, which implies that a 1% change in the user’s price will result in an increase in the producer share of small farms of 0.47 % and large farms of 0.53 %. Changes in user prices can be blamed for between 73% and 79% of the variance in the producer’s share, according to the R2 value. Therefore, changes in user or consumer pricing have a significant effect on the share of the produce. The aforementioned incident clearly illustrates how lucrative the research sector found growing Aloe vera and medicinal plants to be. Producers could still make a better profit even though it cost a lot of money to grow this crop. Since the crop is a medical plant, less manure and fertiliser are used, but pesticides are applied more frequently to reduce pest incidence in the study region.