Lobster farming in Vietnam: the relationship between being cost efficient and environmentally efficient

Abstract

Marine cage lobster in Vietnam has been known as a high return industry. But in recent years, it has also been facing with negative feedback on productivity due to overuse of nutrient content inputs. Local lobster farmers seemed to internalize this negative feedback by paying more efforts on cleaning cage and more cost on antibiotics and chemical without knowing if it is a positive or negative economic-environmental trade-off. In order to identify the relationship between the cost and environmental efficiency, this paper used Data Envelopment Analysis and Material Balance Principle with a dataset of 353 marine cage lobster farms in Vietnam. The findings show that improvements in efficiency of current input used would result in both lower production costs and better environmental performance. There is a positive trade-off in most lobster farms for being environmentally efficient and cost efficient from the current production. If lobster farms used appropriate input mix given input price information to be more cost efficient, it would benefit to environment. Moreover, producing friendlier with the marine environment also reduce production cost. However, there is a negative trade-off for the movement from being cost efficient to environmentally efficient position for all three groups. Acknowledgement :