Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) Production Efficiency and Constraints Among Small Scale Farmers in Southern Kaduna, Nigeria

Abstract

Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) is mostly grown in southern Kaduna Sate, the traditional home of ginger in Nigeria. Its production was boosted with the aim of generating internal trade for the people and improved foreign exchange earnings for Nigeria. However, ginger yields in Nigeria are comparatively very low; and this is ascribed to various factors such as poor agronomic practices, unimproved varieties, laborious farming, harvesting and processing operations amongst others. It is against this background that this study carried out to examine the production, constraints and efficiency of production amongst the predominantly poor, rural farmers in the ginger production areas of southern Kaduna, Nigeria. Results showed that, the elasticity of production, farm size (1.21), ginger seed (2.19), fertilizer (0.06) and labor (0.09) are positive and had a significant effect on ginger production in the study area. The estimated coefficient of age (0.004), farming experience (-0.003), education (-0.02) and ginger variety (-0.28) were significant; while that of household size (0.007) was not significant. The fore-most problems affecting ginger production are risk and uncertainties (81.56%), inadequate supply of fertilizer (80.31%), lack of modern farm equipment (76.25%), and lack of credit facilities (74.1%). The technical efficiency of ginger farmers ranged between 0.74 and 1.00; with a mean technical efficiency of 0.82. On the whole, this result suggests that the technical efficiency in ginger production in the area could be further increased by 18% through better use of available resources, given the current state of technology. It can be concluded that specific factors such as age, household size, year of farming experience, and the narrow gene pool (variety) of ginger planted, contributed positively to the technical and allocative efficiencies of ginger producers in the region. Ginger farmers could be said to be inefficient in the use of resources and/ or were under-utilizing their resources/input. Evidently, they can still use more resources to increase the output of ginger. Without a doubt, addressing these technical deficiencies and/ or inefficiencies could, in effect, boost ginger production, with the concomitant multiplier effect of increasing the profitability of the entire enterprise and up-liftment of the socio-economic living conditions of these predominantly, low technology base and resource poor farmers of the Southern Kaduna State, Nigeria.