PPP Special 08 - Institut für Entwicklungs- und Agrarökonomik

4 Results and discussion
This chapter presents the results of the farm survey.
First, details on the land holding pattern are summarised in order to
show which farmer group, i.e. smaller or larger farmers grew Bt cotton
during its first year of commercialisation.
Farmers’ attitude concerning Bt cotton is presented since the opinions
and perceptions regarding this new technology ultimately affect its
success. These data are summarised in section 4.3. Afterwards, the
characteristics of pesticide use in both Bt and non-Bt cotton production
are presented. Costs of cotton production and productivity aspects are
summarised at the end of the chapter.
In section 4.5 (productivity of cotton production) and 4.6 (economics of
cotton production), the results are presented for across-farm and onfarm
comparison between Bt and non-Bt cotton as well as for irrigated
and rain-fed conditions.
4.1 Land holding
Seventy-five per cent of the respondents were medium or large-scale
farmers. Mainly the large-scale farmers adopted Bt cotton, however, the
majority of farmers in Karnataka are marginal or small farmers (see
Annex A-6). Only one marginal farmer was found to grow Bt cotton. For
that reason this group is not represented in the table below.
Table 4.1 below provides details on the distribution of respondents
according to their farm size.
Table 4.1:
Farm size categories [ha] of respondents
Category
Percentage of
Farmers [%]
Total Land Bt-Area Non - Bt-
Area
Cotton % of
Total Land
Small 7 1.6 0.6 0.2 37.5
Semi 17 3.0 0.4 0.6 35.7
Medium 28 6.4 0.8 1.2 31.3
Large 47 14.3 0.6 1.8 16.5
Source: Field Survey, 2002