Problems of marketing of horticultural produce

a. Subsistence Farming:

• Farming system in Nepal is conventional and subsistence type.
• Each farmer grows most of the crops as per need of his family.
• The scattered form of farming imposed a greater constraint in marketing of horticultural crops.
• From sustainable point of view growing all crops is important.
• For commercial production it should be specialized to particular crop.
• The low volume of products and absence of consolidated marketing system create the great setback for export.

b. Lack of Systematic Marketing System:

• In Nepal marketing system is a major problem.
• Farmers are encouraged to grow vegetables, fruits and high value crops without sustainable market and marketing system.
• Productions without market create embarrassing situations to the growers and discourage production.
• Producers face problems due to lack of transportation facilities such as marketing of apple from high hill regions and citrus fruits in the mid-hill regions.

c. Lack of Physical Infra-structure

• In remote areas inaccessibility to the road is the major problem to produce horticultural commodities.
• The production of most of the fruits is seasonal in nature.
• The production areas are in remote and the bulk of production is confined to a particular limited time.
• Bulk production of seasonal crops in a limited period leads to fetch poor market price due to lack of proper storage and processing units.
• Lack of cleaning, grading, sorting, fumigation, waxing and other packing house operations decrease export quality of the horticultural products.
• In many instances, inferior qualities are processed to different product such as juice, jam jellies and beverages.
• In some crops production without processing is useless such as coffee, tea etc. Because of growing transaction, the size of existing market has squeezed and is not enough.

d. Human Resource Management

• In Nepal the well-trained manpower is not enough.
• There is lack of subject matter specialists (SMS) in spice crops, tea, and coffee sub-sector.
• In the field of postharvest handling and processing of horticultural crops skilled manpower is still lacking.
• Overseas job creates shortage of youth labor in the country as well.
• Due to foreign job migration of people from rural areas to urban areas is in increasing trend.

e. Low Priority in Investment

• Poor economic status of Nepalese people cannot support big projects of commercial production and processing of horticultural crops.
• Inadequate investment of government in horticulture sector is also a great challenge.
• Foreign investor or donors have less priority in fruit sub-sector for investments.