Investment Priorities in the Livestock and Poultry Agribusinesses Value Chains

Abstract

Agricultural sector plays a fundamental role in development, especially in developing countries. Investment in targeted agribusinesses can develop and improve agricultural value chains. Because of capital shortages and different investment requirements of the sector, the capital allocation has become an important decision-making issue for managers and investors of the agricultural sector in recent years. Investors have many alternative investment options in the agriculture sector and factors such as return on investment, investor expertise and interest, government policies, and the comparative advantages of each region can affect the direction of the capital to different agricultural subsectors. The main objective of this study was to investigate investment priorities in the livestock and poultry value chains of Khorasan Razavi Province in Iran. This paper employs the Analytic Network Process (ANP) model for agribusiness investment decisions, which is one of the important Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods. The contribution of this research is that it ranks agribusiness activities on the livestock and poultry value chains and determines the most important areas for investment direction. The results show that “government policies and laws” are the most important factor for business selection in the livestock and poultry subsectors. Furthermore, livestock and poultry feed businesses contribute the most to the progress of the value chains. Therefore, stability in policy-making and appropriate legislation to support agricultural businesses can be effective in this regard.