Affiliation:
1. IIM Shillong, India
2. Doon University, India
Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to gain an insight into the current status of farmers' awareness and practices towards maintaining the postharvest cold chain. The related hypotheses are developed and tested. The major findings include- marginalized and small farms, literacy and poor awareness level are the main causes for the backwardness of Indian farmers. Also, lack of funds forces farmers to ignore the use of cold storage. Further, multi-intermediaries and fluctuating consumer prices result farmers in not getting fair share of the consumer rupee. One of the major challenges in front of fresh food industry in India is to reduce postharvest losses across the chain through increasing awareness level of famers towards cold chain, building market information systems to assist farmers in decision-making and improving food safety and quality of farm produce available in the market.
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