Environmental efficiency in South Asian agriculture: A potential of reducing CO2 emissions and fertilizers usage

Abstract

South Asian governments have introduced renewable energy policies for the reduction of CO2 emissions while keeping up with the demand for food by enhancing agricultural production. Therefore, it is a need to examine the efficiency analysis of agriculture by incorporating CO2 emissions as a bad output for measuring sustainability in their agriculture practices. Also, the study calculated the potential reduction of CO2 emissions and the usage of fertilizers to make agricultural practices sustainable and environmentally efficient. This study estimated the productivity change, technical, and environmental efficiency of rice production for selected South Asian countries. Data were obtained from the FAO-STAT website from 2002 to 2014. The change in rice productivity was measured through total factor productivity (TFP) scores by applying the Malmquist Index (MI) approach. Traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models and Slacks based model (SBM-DEA) were applied for the measurement of technical and environmental efficiency, respectively. The results of the MI approach showed that Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka were found to have positive changes in TFP. The results of technical and environmental efficiency indicated that Bangladesh, Bhutan, and India were found efficient throughout the study period. Afghanistan and Pakistan were found environmentally most inefficient. The slack obtained from the SBM-DEA indicated that Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka had a huge potential to reduce CO2 emissions and usage of fertilizers. Furthermore, this study provides an overview of the sustainable status of agriculture and also provides suggestions in selected South Asian countries. | INTRODUCTIONAgriculture acts a leading role in South Asia, paying to more than 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the utmost regional economies, and generating jobs for over one-third of the working population in the region (Anbumozhi, Breiling, Pathmarajah, & Reddy, 2012). As in the case of other developing regions of the world, three-fourths of the poor of South Asia resides in rural areas, and the majority of them are dependent on agriculture (Anbumozhi et al., 2012). South Asia is home to 1.6 billion people and covers an area of 4.5 × 106 km 2 (Patra et al., 2013). The South Asian countries are largely self-sufficient in food production through a wide range of natural resources, and farming practices (FRA, 2010). In developing countries particularly in South Asia, the majority of farmers' livelihood and food security are dependent on rainfed croplands (Bandara & Cai, 2014;Campbell et al., 2016). A total of 600 million South Asians live with less than US $1.25 a day and were below the poverty line (Amjath-Babu, Aggarwal, & Vermeulen, 2019), and the majority of them are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture (Hertel, Burke, & Lobell, 2010).The increase in food production is a must to feed our rising demands but to address climate change, and greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission must decline. The emissions of GHGs a...

Exploring economic and environmental efficiency in renewable energy utilization: a case study in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries

“…Despite that, a regression of total productivity during the period was observed for all countries in the investigation. In this context, Sharma ( 2022 ) studied the possibility of reducing CO 2 emissions and fertilizer usage to improve the environmental efficiency in South Asian agriculture. The methodology proposed to measure the total factor productivity by Malmquist Index incorporating DEA-SBM to obtain the technical efficiency.…”

“…Regardless of the topic, more complex DEA methodologies have been explored in existing literature. For instance, DEA-SBM has been applied by Chang et al ( 2013 ), Wang et al ( 2020 ), Demiral and Sağlam ( 2021 ), and Sharma ( 2022 ), while DEA undesirable output was used in assessing renewable energy utilization by Wang et al ( 2022 ). Although DEA has been utilized in many aspects of renewables, only a few approaches have investigated the efficiency of renewable energy utilization.…”