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DETERMINANTS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN NIGERIA IMPLICATION FOR AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AGENDA

O. O. Ogundele^* and V.O. Okoruwa²

*Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) Ibadan

²Department of Agricultural Economics University of Ibadan

*Corresponding Author E-mail: olorunfemiogundele@yahoo.com

Accepted 19 July, 2014

This study engaged both Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analyses in estimating technical efficiency and productivity growth among maize farmers in Nigeria. The underlying data for the study were derived from the households’ panel survey conducted by NISER in collaboration with Lund University, Sweden under the African Food Crisis studies carried out in 2002 and 2007 respectively. The result of the technical efficiency analysis showed that all coefficients of the explanatory variables are significant between 1% and 5% but elasticity estimates revealed the inelasticity of output with respect to land, labour, seed and fertiliser and a high gamma value of 0.835, signifying that much of the variation in the composite error term is due to inefficiency. The mean technical efficiency of the farmers under the assumption of constant return to scale were estimated to be 0.66 and 0.53 respectively for period 1 and 2 which indicated that the farmers fell short of the frontier by 34% and 47% in period 1 and 2 respectively. The result further showed that technical efficiency of the farmers also decline by 16% between period 1 and 2. Productivity growth analysis between the two periods suggested a decline as overall productivity reduced by 33% and the decomposition of the productivity into various components revealed that only scale efficiency made significant contribution  as the contribution of each of the other components is less than one. The result of the total factor productivity measure obtained by Fisher Index in period 2 was 0.85 in reference to period 1 which implied that maize farmers in period 2 have a productivity gap of 25% to match the technology of best production. The various analyses carried out in this study pointed to the fact that, in spite of various policies and programmes implemented between 2002 and 2007 to improve productivity in the agricultural sector in Nigeria, the expected result was being hampered by inefficient use of resources, non-application of the right mix of technologies and inability to minimize the cost of production. Therefore, achieving agricultural transformation in Nigeria will required more efforts at increasing the technical efficiency of the farmers which can only be achieved through efficient utilization of productive inputs.

Keywords: Maize , Fertilizer, Food security , Agriculture development

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July 2014 Vol. 1(1)

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Palgo Journal of Agriculture

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