Abstract: ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(18), No.(1), Cairo, Egypt, March 2017.
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The study aims at evaluating the dissimilarity between the indicative and actual cropping patterns. To fulfil these objectives, a descriptive and quantitative analysis and "T" test. This study depends upon secondary data collected from different sources.
The results of the study showed that Egypt's average indicative cropped area was estimated about 15.815 million feddans during the period (2002/03-2005/06) according to the indicative cropping pattern, cereal crops group comes in the first rank, was estimated 47.0% of Egypt's average of the indicative cropped area. However, fodders crops came in the second rank with a percentage of 15.0 %, followed by vegetables, horticulture and fiber crops, representing 12.0%, 7.3% and 5.1% respectively. Other crops ranked sixth, representing 4.3%, followed by Oily seeds crops, sugar crops, and legumes, representing 3.4%, 3.1% and 2.8% respectively.
Based on the study's results of the indicative cropping pattern of Old Lands, the average of the indicative cropped area was estimated about 12.290 million feddans during the same period, representing 77.7% of Egypt's total indicative cropped area. Cereal crops group occupied the first rank, covering 48.8% of Egypt's average of the indicative cropped pattern. However, fodders crops ranked second with a percentage of 17.5%, followed by vegetables, fiber crops and horticulture, representing 10.6%, 6.5% and 4.6% respectively. Other crops ranks sixth, representing 3.9%, followed by, sugar crops, legumes, and oily seeds crops, representing 3.6%, 2.8% and 1.9% respectively.
Furthermore, the results of the indicative cropping pattern in the new lands showed that the average of the indicative cropped area was about 3.525 million feddans during the same period, representing 22.3% of Egypt's average of the indicative cropped area. cereal crops ranked first in the indicative crops area, representing 40.7%. However, vegetables ranked second with a percentage of 17.2%, followed by horticulture, oily seeds crops and fodders crops, representing 17.0%, 8.6% and 6.1% respectively. Also, other crops ranked sixth, representing 5.5%, followed by, legumes sugar crops and fiber crops, representing 3.1%, 1.6% and 0.3% respectively.
As for the actual cropping pattern, the results indicated that Egypt's average of the actual cropped area was appreciated approximately by 14.673 million feddans during the period (2002/03-2005/06) according to the actual cropping pattern. Cereal crops ranked first, representing 47.6% of Egypt's average of the actual cropping area. However, fodders crops ranked second with a percentage of 15.7%, followed by vegetables, horticulture and other crops, representing 12.7%, 7.8% and 4.8% respectively. Fiber crops ranked sixth, representing 4.3%, followed by, Sugar crops, legumes and oily seeds crops, representing 3.3% 1.9%, 1.9% respectively.
According to the results of the actual cropping pattern in the old lands, the average of the actual cropped area was estimated about 12.198 million feddans during the same period, representing 83.01% of Egypt's average of the actual cropped area. Cereal crops ranked first, covering an area of 50.3% of Egypt's average of the actual cropped area. Yet, fodders crops ranked second with a percentage of 17.3%, followed by vegetables, horticulture and other crops, representing 11.2%,5.2% and 4.3% respectively. However, fiber crops ranked sixth representing 5.2%, followed by sugar crops, legumes, and oily seeds crops, representing 3.6%, 1.8% and 1.0% respectively.
However, in accordance with the results of the actual cropping pattern in the new lands, the average of the actual cropped area was estimated about 2.475 million feddans during the same period, representing 16.9% of Egypt's average of the actual cropped area. Cereal crops ranked first, covering an area of 34.1% of Egypt's average of the actual cropped area. However, horticulture ranked second with a percentage of 20.7%, followed by vegetables, fodders crops and other crops, representing 20.5%, 7.6% and 7.1% respectively. Yet, oily seeds crops ranked sixth representing 5.9%, followed by legumes, sugar crops and fiber crops, representing 2.6,1.4%% and 0.3% respectively.
Moreover, the results pointed out that the indicative planning policy of cropped and cultivated areas didn't arrive at its goals, since the gap between Egypt's average of the actual and indicative cropped area is estimated 7.3% , and cultivated areas is estimated 2.72%. As for Old Lands, this percentage reached for 0.7% out of the cropped area and about 4.9% of the cultivated area. On the other hand, this percentage reached for 29.8% of the cropped area, and 24.2% of the cultivated areas in the new lands.
On the light of these results, the study concluded that the dissimilarity between the indicative and actual cropping patterns owing to the high prices, feddan net retur of some cash crops for example rice and long clover (berseem), comparing of other crops in the indicative cropping pattern.
The study recommends to give more attention to strategic crops through encouraging farmers to cultivate these crops by providing them with good seeds at reasonable prices and providing them with other inputs like chemical fertilizers at subsidized prices, besides the announcement of indicative production prices by which the Government should buy the production if the farmer to follow the indicative cropping pattern.
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