Abstract
Improving technical efficiency of smallholder farmers is one of the options to increase wheat yield in developing countries. This paper assesses technical efficiency, factors for inefficiency and the yield gap due to technical inefficiency in major wheat producing regions of Ethiopia, where the support to agricultural research for development of strategic crops (SARD-SC) wheat project has been implemented using primary data collected from 946 sample households operating 1616 wheat plots. One-step stochastic frontier approach with a Translog production form was used for econometric analysis. The results show that the mean technical efficiency of the overall sample is 0.769 meaning about 23% technical inefficiency in the system implying that the sample wheat producers are producing at a yield gap of 659 kg/ha. Different input variables contribute for wheat yield. It also reveals that education, oxen ownership, credit, soil fertility, using tractor, and using improved seed (in Tigray) were found to improve technical efficiency of wheat producers either for the overall or for some regions. On the contrary, family labor negatively affects efficiency in Oromia and in overall sample, while using improved seed (in Amhara and SNNP), plot distance and crop rotation (in Oromia) had a negative effect on technical efficiency. Key words: Technical efficiency, wheat, Ethiopia.
Highlights
Increasing wheat production and productivity could usefully reduce the burden of wheat imports by Ethiopia
The results indicated that the technical efficiency of wheat producers is about 77% for the overall sample but varies from innovation platform (IP) site to IP site
The result shows that the average yield gap due to technical inefficiency of farmers ranges from 527 kg/ha to 845 kg/ha with a yield gap of 659 kg/ha for the overall sample indicating domestic wheat production could be significantly increased only by improving farmers practices with the current amount of resource they are using
Summary
Increasing wheat production and productivity could usefully reduce the burden of wheat imports by Ethiopia. To this end, the country has been implementing several research and development strategies. The attention given to improved wheat variety generation and dissemination is one of the attempts made by the government. According to Ministry of Agriculture (MoA, 2014), 67 and 33 bread and durum wheat varieties, respectively, have been released from different federal and regional agricultural research centers and disseminated for production. According to the Central Statistical Agency (CSA, 2005, 2015) reports, the domestic production of wheat increased from 2.2 million tons in 2004/2005 to 4.2 million tons ten years later (2014/2015), which is a 91% growth.
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