Growth performance of rice sector: the present scenario in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The Sri Lanka government is promoting the development of agriculture sector with the slogan of “Let us grow more to uplift the nation”. Therefore, this study was carried out to analyse the growth perfor mance of rice sector, and to identify the appropriate model to predict the future trend of the sector in Sri Lanka. The study was mainly done based upon the secondary data. The growth performance was analyzed by considering mainly four variables such as sown extent, harvested extent, total production and productivity. Then, behaviour of different variables was tested by using scatted plot diagram with time. Based on the behaviour of the variable, different time series (TS) models were tested. Sown extent and harvested extent have not shown a strong relationship with time. Over the years average sown ex tent and harvested extent were 858.28 and 813.37 ha thousand, respectively. But total production (thousand Mt) and productivity (kg per ha) have increased significantly with time. Therefore, the re sponsible factor to increase the total rice production was increasing the productivity. Cubic model was the most suitable to predict the total production and productivity which were Y = 1557.82 + 173.52t - 11.17t2 + 0.24t3 (r2= 89.51) and Y = 2227.67+ 210.13 t - 11.19t2 + 0.22t3 (r2= 95.20) respectively. In this context, it is possible to meet future demand for rice through increasing the land productivity by adopt in