Theses & Dissertations

Sea food acts as a main component in the diet of most countries around the world  and contributes as a main supply of animal protein. The demand of dried fish is met by both  local production and imports but, Sri Lanka is endowed with marine resources. There are so  many researches done on dried fish nutrients, supply chain and markets. But the price  analysis on dried fish has been done rarely. Price analysis with the analysis of market  profitability and efficiency helps the policy makers to discover sustainable and an entire  marketing strategies. The research was conducted to find out the pricing mechanism of both  rural and urban dried fish markets of Batticaloa and compare them with the Colombo dried  fish market using price indices. The research was done with the primary data and the  secondary data which was collected from HARTI. The average wholesale and retail prices  and their standard deviations were calculated. Spanish mackerel had the highest average  prices among the selected varieties of dried fish in both rural and urban dried fish markets.  Marketing costs were higher in urban sector than the rural at producer, wholesaler levels and  lower in retailer level in the percentage of total costs. Wholesalers had the highest profit  margin in both rural (21.2%) and urban (14.9%) sectors as they set high mark-up. Spanish  mackerel has the highest producer share (87%) in rural and String rays has the highest  producer share (88%) in urban sector. Queen fish and Skip jack tuna have the highest  wholesale and retailer share (23%) in rural and Skip jack tuna has the highest wholesale and  retailer share (23%) in urban sector. The marketing efficiencies for Queen fish, Mackerel  shark, Giant catfish, String rays and imported sprats were higher in urban sector than in rural  sector and marketing efficiencies for Spanish mackerel, Skip jack tuna and White sardinella  were higher in rural sector than in urban sector. Prices of White sardinella and imported  sprats are higher and Spanish mackerel, Mackerel shark and Giant catfish were lower  compared to Colombo market price in rural sector at producer level. Retail prices of II  Colombo dried fish market are higher than Batticaloa dried fish markets. There was a  positive correlation between Colombo dried fish market at retail level yet it was not  significant and negative correlation between wholesale level with Colombo dried fish market  but it was significant. The dried fish market of urban Batticaloa is better comparing to the  Colombo market as well as the Batticaloa rural market. The urban dried fish market of  Batticaloa had more varieties of dried fish efficiency compared to the rural dried fish market  and it had more producer share as well. Though it had low profit compared to the rural dried  fish market, it had low marketing cost with high efficiency. The average prices of wholesale  and retail were low in urban dried fish market compared to the rural dried fish market which  was a sign of a healthy economy of our nation.