Abstract
This study examines the relative technical efficiency of mixed crop-livestock farming systems and assesses their economic performance between the Upper and Delta regions of Egypt. A non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) method is empirically applied for measuring technical efficiency using farm-level data for 838 mixed crop-livestock farmers. The findings show that the mixed crop-livestock farms in Egypt are operating at a low level of technical efficiency, indicating most farms are unable to catch up with the current production frontier and existing production technologies. Farms in the Delta region perform slightly better than those farms in Upper Egypt. Results also suggest that technical efficiency improvement is positively affected by farmers’ education, having a farm milk production certificate, and being located in the Delta region, whereas farm size negatively affects the economic performance of mixed crop-livestock farming systems in Egypt. ,,
Highlights
Livestock products are the best sources of highly digestible proteins and micronutrients, which are essential for human health and nutrition
Turning to differences in the technical efficiency (TE) scores across the two regions, the findings show that farms in the Delta region have higher TE scores than those in the Upper region
The illiteracy rate in Upper Egypt is higher than in the Delta region given that our results indicate that the illiteracy rate is affecting negatively the TE, the infrastructure in Upper Egypt is not suitable for supporting improve the production efficiency to marketing and selling livestock product in this region
Summary
Livestock products are the best sources of highly digestible proteins and micronutrients, which are essential for human health and nutrition. In response to this population increase and the growing demand for animal products, livestock productivity in Egypt needs to be improved Both cattle and buffaloes play an important role in the mixed crop-livestock production systems of Egypt. There hasn’t been any studies assessing the performance of livestock farms, nor the differences among productivity and TE between the Delta region and Upper Egypt. The SFA method assumes that the distributions deviated from an estimated frontier are inefficient and a certain form of frontier must be defined, leading to a biased TE estimation For this reason, most recent studies, especially agribusiness ones, prefer to apply the DEA approach instead of the SFA. To overcome the shortcomings of the SFA method, we used a DEA model in this paper to assess the TE of the livestock farms in Egypt and determine the differences in performances between farms in the Delta region and Upper Egypt.
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