4.2. Logistics Cost Analysis
Logistics activities of mangosteen farmers can be categorized into five parts, as shown in Table 1. The logistics cost of all activities are collected and computed accordingly.
For farmers, the logistics cost per kg of mangosteens is the annual expense divided by the quantity of mangosteens produced in that year.
However, this can vary from farm to farm, according to practices and economies of scale due to the size of the farm.
Hence we instead calculated the proportion of the logistics cost for each category.
At present, the farmer population in eastern Thailand numbers many thousands.
For the purposes of this study we randomly selected 30 farms. Of these, however, only 19 farms had complete information.
The confidence interval of the farmers logistics cost proportion, assuming normal distribution, was calculated and reported by using t statistics at a 95% confidence level (t0.025,18 = 2.101).
The results show that the proportion of the logistics cost for farmers in eastern Thailand is between the upper and lower bounds (Table 2) and the logistics cost structure of farmers categorized by activity is shown in Figure 2.