Financing and Marketing Management

Unit 18 - Domestic Fish Marketing in India

18.1. Domestic Fish Marketing in India
Fish is one of the highly perishable commodities and it occupies a very important place in the socioeconomic development of the country. The fishery sector contributes to the livelihood of a large section of economically underprivileged population in India (Ayyappan and Krishnan, 2004). While the demand of fish and fishery products is steadily growing and is fairly uniform across the country, the supply of fish is highly seasonal and it comes from diverse production environment, leading to price fluctuations across regions and seasons, and even within the day, which is exploited by the middlemen, resulting in reduced welfare of fishermen.
The domestic fish marketing system in India is neither efficient nor modern and is mainly carried out by private traders with a large number of intermediaries between producer and consumer, thereby reducing the fisherman’s share in consumer’s rupee. Physical facilities and infrastructure in all types of fish markets are far from satisfactory (FAO, 2001). Some of the problems in fish marketing include high perishability and bulkiness of material, high heterogeneity in size and weight among species, high cost of storage and transportation, no guarantee of quality and quantity of commodity, low demand elasticity and high price spread (Ravindranath,2008).
Gupta (1984) and Srivastava (1985) had studied the marketing of fish and fishery products in India, wherein they had analyzed price variations among species across states and had identified infrastructural bottlenecks in efficient marketing system. Rao (1983) had emphasized that an efficient fish marketing system could eliminate some of the depressed pockets of malnutrition by supplying fish at reasonable prices to people living on subsistence level. There has not been a comprehensive study thereafter, covering a wider range of species, markets and their structure, conduct, performance and the status of policies relevant to fish marketing in the country. Some studies that have been conducted are concentrated on local markets with respect to one or two species. It is difficult to generalize the regional results since fish is a highly heterogeneous commodity with tremendous spatial and seasonal variations in size, quantity, quality and price.
The system of fish marketing in India has traditionally been highly unorganized and unregulated, which is the prime cause of inefficiency in the whole process. Attempts have been made to overcome this perennial problem by fishermen group as well as government agencies in some pockets of our country. In general, the fishermen could be saved from exploitation by encouraging group marketing, cooperative marketing, contract marketing, etc., which would increase the marketing efficiency and improve their profit (Chahal et al., 2004; Ali et al.,2008). But, these kinds of efforts have largely been confined to a few small locations covering few species and were highly scattered. Unlike poultry or dairy industry, innovations in fish marketing have not been on a macrolevel. Katiha et al. (2004) have studied the governance, institutions and policies for fisheries of floodplain wetlands, wherein they revealed that the stakeholders include fishers, government agencies, lessee, fishery co-operatives, village authority, community leaders, market agents, political leaders and NGOs and their interactions and transparency are essential to increase the efficiency of the markets.