An empirical investigation of growth and instability in groundnut crop: A three stage spatio-temporal analysis

Abstract

Groundnut-The king of oilseeds, a principal economic crop has its spread across the world for growing under different agroclimatic-locations. The crops’ widespread cultivation and its competitive market presence at the globe level, is for its multifarious utility. Realising the peanut’s overall predominance among oilseeds, it is vital to capture the fluctuations of the output, its sources of growth and variance to understand the groundnut growth scenario. Thus, this paper employs Compound Annual Growth Rates, Cuddy Della Valle Index and Hazell’s decomposition method in III-stages (World, India and Telangana) for 3-decades (1992-2022). The world peanut had shown positive growth rates and low instabilities. The African countries (Nigeria, Sudan) exhibited (Area > yield) growth thus, they must emphasize on productivity improvement. But, countries like India, Indonesia witnessed decline in area growth. India, the major peanut cultivator is losing its acreage, but production growth is substantiated by increased productivity. The declining area growth rates in the country were obvious through its low acreage growth in major states whose yield instabilities were higher than in area (except Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan). This is due to predominant Kharif Groundnut cultivation that hinders productivity. Although Telangana’s groundnut (Rabi crop) is improving its yield growth rate next to Gujarat, but was not among major states for its low acreage under cultivation. Changes in mean yield and yield variance were responsible for production growth and production variance of groundnut, in the state and the country. Hence, it is imperative to focus on increasing acreage and decreasing yield instabilities via crop specific policy implications for India and Telangana.