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Technical Efficiency Of Paddy Farming Under Major Irrigation Conditions In The Dry-Zone Of Sri Lanka: A Parametric Approach

2013; International Network for Scientific Information Publication; Volume: 7; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

2309-8414

A. Aruna Shantha, Bakhtiar Ali, R. A. G. Bandara,

Sustainable Agricultural Systems Analysis

Available literature suggests that paddy farmers in the developing countries fail to exploit the full potential of a technology and make allocative errors. Thus, increasing the efficiency in paddy production assumes greater significance in attaining potential output at the farm level. However it is an undeniable fact that the majority of dry zone paddy farmers are characterized by poor economic status due to inefficient utilization of available resources. This paper investigates the technical efficiency of rice farming in a major irrigation schemes in Sri Lanka and to suggest some policy recommendation for improving the efficiency of resource use in paddy industry under major irrigation conditions. The experiment site was a Nagadeepa reservoir in Mahiyanganaya. The empirical study was carried based on a sample of 357 paddy farmers under Nagadeepa reservoir. In this study, the technical efficiency of paddy farmers was estimated by using stochastic frontier production function, incorporating technical efficiency effect model. The Traslog production function was found to be an adequate representation of the data. According to the results obtained from the stochastic frontier estimation, the average technical efficiency of selected farmers given by the Traslog model is 72.80 per cent. This indicates that there is scope of farther increasing the output by 27.2 percent without increasing the level of input.