Application of ARIMA models in forecasting livestock products consumption in Tanzania

Abstract

Poverty is a major problem Tanzania is facing, which depends on agriculture as the main economic activity. Different stakeholders have involved themselves in boosting agricultural productivity, especially in semiarid regions, where their main focus is on drought tolerant crops such as sorghum and millet. If this support is not linked with market opportunities, commodity prices may be depressed and discourage farmers. This paper determines prospect for increasing utilization of animal feed as the market opportunity for farmer by forecast consumption of livestock product such as eggs, milk, chicken and cow meat. Autoregressive integrated moving average models were used for forecasting with the data from FAOSTAT. The result shows that consumption of all livestock products will increase, hence expected demand for animal feed. This paper calls for more research works in analyzing factors that may affect consumption of livestock products such as population increase and change of consumption behavior toward livestock products.

Keywords

• livestock production
• arima models
• sorghum and millet farming
• semiarid regions
• feed industry