Assessment of the operational and environmental efficiency of agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Governments in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) require information that can be used to strengthen environmental agricultural strategies. However, in LAC there is not enough comparative analysis regarding operational performance and environmental performance, which are particularly important for sustainable agriculture. The objective of this study is the measurement of operational, environmental and unified (operational and environmental) efficiency through data envelopment analysis (DEA) for an environmental assessment in the agricultural sectors of eighteen LAC countries. The DEA in this study evaluates each country based on six variables: capital stock, labour, land, consumption of fertilizers, value of the gross agricultural production and agricultural emissions (CO<sub>2</sub>eq). This empirical study finds that six LAC countries attained full efficiency in terms of the three efficiency measurements. Three countries exhibit the highest level of unified efficiency, but show some level of inefficiency in the other two measurements (operational and environmental efficiency). In contrast, nine countries failed to achieve the maximum unified efficiency score.