Ajitha T KUnnikrishnan, TKAU2020-10-272020-10-272009https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810153809PGThe present investigations on “Changing scenario of Kerala agriculture – an overview” was carried out in the Department of Agricultural Statistics, College of Horticulture, Vellanikkara during 2006 – ’09. The secondary data on area, production, productivity and price of major crops of Kerala viz; coconut, rubber, paddy(season wise), pepper, cashew, arecanut, coffee, tapioca and banana collected from the Directorate of Economics and Statistics for the period from 1952-53 to 2006-07 were used for the analysis. The main objectives of the study included assessment of trend and growth rates of area, production, productivity and price, testing of the cointegrated movement of price and respective area of each crop, identification of the best ARIMA(Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) model for prediction of area, production, productivity and price and comparison of predictability of forecasting models developed by different techniques. Modified P-Gan’s method helped to understand whether the growth rate in crop production was mainly due to area or productivity. The series of prices and areas of respective crops could be co-integrated and the regression models evolved through this technique resulted in moderately high values of predictability. ARIMA models were superior to other models developed achieving a maximum value of R2 = 99.8% for the prediction of area of rubber with a very low value of MAFPE = 1.23%. Excellent parsimonious forecasting equations could be generated using the ARIMA technique for all the crops studied. The general findings of the study showed that there was a shift in area from food crops to non-food crops. The production of major food crops, rice and tapioca reached at negative growth rates due to the declining trend of their areas. But production rate of banana has increased due to increase in both area and yield. Among cash crops, both area and productivity growths influenced the production rates. The major cash crops coconut, arecanut and pepper showed positive growth rates. Compared to food crops, cash crops in general showed better growth trends in production. Negative growth rate in the production of cashewnut was due to the decline in area. Among plantation crops, rubber and coffee attained a high production growth rate due to the combined growth of area and productivity. The highest production growth rate and area growth rate were recorded by rubber among all the crops studied.EnglishThesis