Forecasting Area, Production and Yield of Onion in Bangladesh by Using ARIMA Model

In Bangladesh, onion is the widely used spices both for preparing food and curing diseases as it has medicinal values. As the demand for onion is increasing day by day, it is necessary to make actual projections of onion for undertaking some policies based on it. Therefore, the study investigates the future changes in the area, yield and production of onion in Bangladesh by using the most popular Box-Jenkins methodology. The auto regressive integrated moving average model has been used to understand the pattern of change over a period of 57 years (1961 to 2017) as well as to forecast the changes in the upcoming years. Some information criteria (such as AIC, AICc and BIC) was considered for selecting the best-fitted models of each variable. The forecasted results showed an upward trend for all the variables considered in this study. It implies that the area of onion will increase from 193932.6 hectares in 2018 to 265770.9 hectare in 2027. Again, the amount of onion production will increase from 2073.61 M tons to 3574.06 M tons and for onion yield, it will rise from 10343.17 Kg/ha to 12988.02 kg/ha from 2018 to 2027. These predictions may help the government balancing the demand with the supply and also regulating the price of onion in the domestic markets of Bangladesh.