Book Description

In the first chapter of the dissertation, we estimate the impacts of controlling for environmental production conditions on smallholder farmers' technical efficiency in Ethiopia for maize, sorghum and wheat farming. We use a household panel dataset with annual and cropping season environmental production conditions data. Our results show that accounting for environmental production conditions in the stochastic frontier helps to determine the sources of inefficiencies which may otherwise be ignored or overestimated. The mean estimates of the technical efficiency scores differ when we control for environmental production conditions during the cropping season and annually. The second chapter of the dissertation examines the efficiency of smallholder farmers who adopt improved maize using agricultural household data from Ethiopia. We find that smallholder farmers are becoming more efficient in growing improved seeds than local varieties even though there are still some inefficiencies. The mean technical efficiency of improved maize farmers increases by 2.9%. For improved open pollinated varieties, it increases by 9.21%. We attribute the increase in efficiency to the changes in agricultural systems of most Sub-Saharan African countries. Therefore, given that the dissemination and adoption of improved seeds is increasing in Africa, efforts should be made to assist smallholder farmers to be more efficient in growing these seeds. The third chapter provides an insight into the efficiency of peanut farmers in Haiti. We use the stochastic production frontier to show how the agricultural training program impacts the efficiency of smallholder peanut farmers in Haiti. Specifically, we estimate the technical efficiency of farmers enrolled in the training program offered by a for profit organization and those who qualify to enroll but chose not to. Our results indicate that the program had positive effect on the efficiency of peanut farmers during the spring growing season. Farmers who enrolled in the spring season had efficiency scores of 36% more than those who chose not to enroll. Further, we find a large gap in efficiency scores between farmers who enrolled in the fall and spring growing seasons, suggesting that environmental variables should also be included in farm efficiency studies.