Efficiency in rice cultivation in north-western region of Bangladesh

Meeting the increasing demand for food grains requires almost a parallel growth in food grain production, either by increasing the utilization of inputs or by effectively organizing the management of production. The main objective of the present study was to identify and analyze the possibilities for improving productivity of rice by increasing the productive efficiency of rice farmers under both flood-prone and flood free environments in Bangladesh. The study employed mainly farm level cross sectional data collected from 298 farm households in three districts of Bangladesh. The stochastic frontier production function has been employed to measure the efficiency and to identify the cause of inefficiency in the production processes. Estimates of yield functions revealed that, among the biophysical factors, land type, soil type and the selection of rice variety influenced the yield significantly. Among the management factors, both seedling number and seedling age appeared to be the important determinants of yield. Among the socioeconomic factors, farmers’ contact with the extension worker had the positive and significant influence. The estimates of the technical inefficiency model showed that, seedling number dummy, extension contact, farmer’s education, seedling age and gap filling are the important determinants of technical inefficiency of rice farmers. The γ parameter associated with the variances in the stochastic frontier is highly significant indicating that, there are inefficiency effects in the production of MV Boro in the sample farms. The estimated average technical efficiency was 0.81, 0.80 and 0.78 for the farms under Rangpur, Dinajpur and Rajshahi respectively. Several biophysical, management and socioeconomic factors were found responsible for reducing efficiency at the farm level. Therefore, by taking necessary steps from both the Government and private sectors will enhance the substantial scope for improving technical efficiency of the rice growing farms.