Abstract
Today’s agricultural management decisions impact food security and sustainable ecosystems, even when operating with back-to-basic operations. In such endeavors, policymakers usually need a quantitative tool, such as trade-offs margins, to effectively adjust resource consumption or production. This paper applies the weighted slack-based measurement (SBM-DEA) program to 136 developing countries’ agricultural performance. First, it finds the current agricultural efficiency and then makes marginal trade-offs on desirable-output variables (such as crop yield and forest area) to see the effective changes in undesirable-output (such as methane and nitrous oxide emissions). The results show that choosing effective marginal trade-offs does not deteriorate the relative efficiency of the decision-making units (DMUs) below the efficient frontier line. Thus, such a method enables the decision-makers to determine the best marginal trade-off points to reach the optimal efficiencies and decide which output factor needs special brainstorming to design effective policy.
Highlights
Massive agricultural activity has become a potential contributor to ecological efficiency as it is directly proportional to the forest area and cultivating emissions
We present here the slack-based measurement (SBM) model to be used with undesirable outputs
Agriculture is becoming the center of concern in terms of food security and ecological Agriculture is becoming the center of concern in terms of food security and ecological betterment
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. It enables us to bring improvement in the undesirable outputs by performing trade-offs among the desirable outputs. This means we do not have to reduce the inputs (i.e., resources like land and manpower, etc.). We mean that the DMUs may have appeared efficient (i.e., on the efficient frontier), but due to slacks in an undesirable output, they are considered weakly efficient Their efficiency can be further improved to the optimal level with the help of marginal trade-offs. It calculates the margins, by using the method proposed by Krivonozhko et al [14], with which the trade-offs can be performed. The marginal trade-offs are to be considered only among desirable-outputs to improve the efficiency of undesirable-outputs.
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