Technical Efficiency of Boro Rice Production in Meherpur District of Bangladesh: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

Abstract

Although rice is the main crop in Bangladesh and the country is ranked as the sixth largest rice producer in the world, researchers observe that rice is not produced with full efficiency in the country. It is also observed that owing to the application of high yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilizer, pesticide, and irrigation, productivity of rice in Bangladesh has increased in the recent years though it is still lower compared to other Asian countries. A review of existing literature reveals that so far little attention has been given by the researchers in investigating the efficiency of rice production in Bangladesh. Thus, the objective of the present study is to analyze the technical efficiency of rice production in Bangladesh using data from boro rice farmers. Required data are collected from 115 boro rice producing farmers of Meherpur district selected using multistage random sampling procedure. In analyzing the data, farm specific technical efficiency scores are estimated using the Translog Stochastic Frontier Production function approach. The study found that technical efficiency of boro rice farms in Meherpur district is 89.5%. It is also found that ‘labor’, ‘fertilizer and pesticide’, ‘seed’ and ‘irrigation’ are the significant factors that affect the level of technical efficiency while ‘farm size’ and ‘ploughing cost’ are found insignificant in affecting technical efficiency of boro rice production in the study area. The results indicate that boro rice farms in the study area have been operating below the maximum level of production frontier and given the available technology, farmers can increase their production by 10.5% through increasing the use of labor, seed and irrigation inputs and also by using proper doses of fertilizer and pesticide inputs.