Technical efficiency and artisanal fishing households: Any hope in oil extracting locations? Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

Artisanal fishing household’s production is investigated using stochastic frontier analysis through Cobb-Douglas production function, which incorporates an inefficiency effects model. Descriptive statistics and profitability index were also used to analyzed the data collected. One hundred and twenty eight households were randomly picked through multistage techniques in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria. Primary data were chosen using structured questionnaire and interview schedule. Results indicates that greater part of respondents were males with an average age of 42 years who were married with household size of 6 persons. Very many of them did not belong to cooperative society with high educational level. The result indicates that labour, baits and capital inputs were significantly related to output. The average technical efficiency was 73%. This means that the households can still improve their efficiency level by 27%. The structure of production suggests that the returns to scale was 0.9584. The estimated gamma parameter was 0.9423 and was significant at 5% level. Access to credit, membership of cooperative society and fishing experience had an inverse relationship with technical inefficiency while age, fishing distance, gender, number of trips and oil spill had a direct relationship with inefficiency. Artisanal fishing was found to be profitable with a net farm income of N135261.21 and a benefit cost ratio (BCR) of N1.20k. The major constraint to artisanal fishing was pollution. Therefore, the study calls for policies that increases the security of oil pipelines in order to stem the tide of oil spillage and invariably water pollution.

Female fish farmers: How technically efficient are they? Evidence from Delta State Nigeria

“…This implies that the farther the distance of farm from farmer's residence the higher the technical inefficiency. This support the findings of Gbigbi (2019).…”

“…The study suggests that $0.64 was made as a profit for each $1.00 spent on catfish farming. This finding is consistent with Gbigbi et al (2019) assertion that aquaculture is a lucrative investment venture in cooperative fish farming, as supported by the BCR of N2.06.…”

“…This reveals that by expanding farmland, there is space for increasing production. With previous works by Gbigbi (2019), this outcome agrees that the greater the stock size, the more successful a farmer becomes. This means that as the fish farmer buys more fingerlings, the efficiency of catfish production increases.…”

“…The negative sign of age implies that as the farmer increases in age, she would gain more experience in farming which could increase farm technical efficiency in other words farm inefficiency will be reduced. This disagreed with the work of Gbigbi (2019).…”

“…It is suspected that their technical efficiency level is the major reason for the poor production level. A panacea for evaluating the capacity for sustainable aquaculture development would be to evaluate the technical efficiency level by identifying the significant factors related with efficient production systems (Gbigbi, 2019).…”