Estimating the Indicators of productive and Marketing Efficiency of the Green Pepper under the Protected Cultivation System in Baghdad Province

Abstract

The Iraqi agricultural sector is of great importance among other economic sectors, this sector is still facing several challenges in the field of its tasks by providing food for members of society, providing the necessary foreign currencies to finance development plans, and the incompatibility of seasonal production with optimal import periods, which makes vertical expansion one of the necessary means for development this sector, and the trend to the protected agriculture system, as one of the means of agricultural intensification. The research aims to study the productive and marketing efficiency of the green pepper crop under the protected cultivation system, by estimating the production cost functions, estimating the optimal economic size, calculating some financial evaluation criteria for this crop, and identifying the most important production and marketing obstacles facing the farmers of this system. Through estimating the results of the productive and economic indicators of the green pepper in greenhouses, it became clear that there is an economic efficiency in its production, where the return-to-cost ratio was greater than one. The results of estimating the production cost function of green pepper indicated that the crop does not achieve the required level of efficiency in its production, where the optimal size of production was about 3.3 tons, while the average production of the selected sample was about 2.73 tons. The estimated results also indicated that the total marketing costs of green pepper amounted to about 13,244,000 Iraqi dinars, and the marketing efficiency of the crop was about 76%.