Agricultural marketing cater to which of the following problems faced by the farmers?

• It helps in the transportation, storage problems
• It helps the farmers is selling their surplus production at fair prices
• It helps the farmers in getting adequate credit at a reasonable interest rate

1 and 2

Agricultural marketing is a process that involves the assembling, storage, processing, transportation, packaging, grading and distribution of different agricultural commodities across the country. It does not relate to any assistance for loans/credits at a reasonable interest rate.

Prior to independence, farmers, while selling their produce to traders, suffered from faulty weighing and manipulation of accounts. Farmers who did not have the required information on prices prevailing in markets were often forced to sell at low prices. They also did not have proper storage facilities to keep back their produce for selling later at a better price.Therefore, government intervention became necessary to regulate the activities of the private traders.

Four such measures were initiated to improve the marketing aspect by the government. The first step was regulation of markets to create orderly and transparent marketing conditions. By and large, this policy benefited farmers as well as consumers. Second component is provision of physical infrastructure facilities like roads, railways, warehouses, godowns, cold storages and processing units.Cooperative marketing, in realising fair prices for farmers’ products, is the third aspect of government initiative. The fourth element is the policy instruments like (i) assurance of minimum support prices (MSP) for agricultural products (ii) maintenance of buffer stocks of wheat and rice by Food Corporation of India and (iii) distribution of food grains and sugar through PDS.