The aim of this study is to compare the technical efficiency of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and Conventional Rice Production System (CRPS) farmers in Mali. Using cross-sectional data for 208 randomly selected rice farmers, the Stochastic Meta Frontier model is applied. The results indicate that the mean technical efficiency is 0.96 and 0.79 for SRI and CRPS respectively. This implies that SRI farmers were more technically efficiency than their counterpart. Similarly, the mean technology gap ratio was 0.98 and 0.91 for SRI and CRPS farmers, respectively. We also find that rice paddy production (SRI) was positively influenced by labor and negatively by organic manure while rice paddy production (CRPS) was positively linked with inorganic fertilizer and land. Further investigation reveals that family labor and flooding level increased the technical inefficiency for SRI adopters whereas education had a negative impact. For the CRSP farmers, the current factors were unable to account for technical inefficiency except age of farm household head. Our study finds strong cause to encourage SRI adoption as it could be the highly searched for solution for farmers to increase their yields and eventually enhance their food security status.
There is a growing use of mobile phones in rural areas on account of its relative inexpensiveness and lack of requirement for an urban environment. As a platform for accessing information through text messages and voice calls, farmers are able to collect agricultural information which may lead to higher productivity due to technology spillover. If the use of mobile phones contributes to the improvement of farmers' productivity, their agricultural output level should increase. In this study, we investigate the adoption of mobile phones to obtain agricultural information and its effect on smallholder maize farmers' production using cross-sectional data from Zambia. Understanding such causal effects is indispensable especially against the background of vision 2030. The propensity score matching (PSM) method was adopted to estimate the average treatment effect of treated of mobile phone adoption in agriculture. We found that the use of mobile phones significantly increases farmers' productivity, by about 30%. If farmers start to adopt mobile phones to collect agricultural information, the total maize output would also increase by 30.36%, which would culminate in feeding two more people per household daily for the whole year. Therefore, we cautiously conclude that mobile phone use in agriculture serves the purpose of contributing to the fight against hunger via enhancing maize production and this is driving its popularity among smallholder farmers in rural Zambia.
The government of Togo reintroduced Farmer Input Support Program (FISP) as one of its Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) in 2002. Since the introduction of the program, the studies that evaluate its effects on income have focused either on fertilizer or seed component, but not on both, which made it a challenge to find out what improvements in small-scale farmers’ productivity can be attributed to FISP as a whole. Using Propensity Score Matching technique with collected data from 150 randomly surveyed households in the Kara region of Togo, the authors of the study estimated the impact of FISP on beneficiary households’ output from maize production. The results show that FISP augmented household annual maize income by 30.8% and total household income by 13.9% for both 2016/17 and 2017/18 cropping seasons. However, even though FISP is achieving its objective of improving small-scale farmers’ income, this increment is still not large enough to take households above the poverty line, and the effects of FISP to reduce overall poverty is also limited.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.