Evaluation of Critical Barriers related to Primary Agribusiness Construction: A Developing Country Case Study

Abstract

Production of each grain of food requires lots of water, causes emissions, reduces forest cover to free more lands for agriculture and cost monetary resources to produce. 53% of food wastage in South Korea is during the first 4 phases of food supply chain. UN food and agricultural organization puts global food wastage figure near 1.3 billion tons annually. 40% of agricultural products of Pakistan get wasted during production, post-harvesting, processing, distribution, and consumption phase. Developed countries have established required infrastructure to facilitate food supply chain in a way which reduces food wastages. United States of America alone have almost 15,000 grain elevators. Tanzania is able to store food items in grain elevators and silos for almost 6 months without use of any additives. Other developing countries like India and Bangladesh are taking the lead but Pakistan still lack any such initiatives to reduce the food wastages. There is a need to identify the barriers in industry- wide implementation of grain elevators and silos to reduce grain wastage by increasing storage life of food items. Questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 11 respondents that had many years of experience in relevant projects. Interpretive Structure Modeling analysis tool is used to shortlist the barriers identified from literature. A hierarchy model is established at the end of ISM analysis. Furthermore, MICMAC analysis is used to categorize all the barriers based on their driving and dependence power. Investigation reveals that potentially higher overall cost to traditional approach, Lack of experience contractors and technical difficulty during D&C process are the most important barriers in agri-business infrastructure construction. This study also proposes strategies to tackle each group of barriers.