The Technical Efficiency of Wheat Growers in the Gezira Scheme: An Econometric Model

Abstract

ABSTRACRT The objectives of this study briefly were to examine the technical efficiency of the tenant farmers of wheat in the Gezira Scheme, and to investigate the causal factors explaining this efficiency in the scheme, and hence draw conclusions and recommendations to be considered by the management and policy-makers. The technical efficiency of the ith tenant farmer is defined in terms of the ratio of his mean production to the corresponding mean production if the farmer effect is zero. The scope of this thesis was limited to an analysis of data collected from selected sample of tenant farmers in an attempt to investigate the technical efficiency of the wheat producers in relation to the economic and socio-cultural complex in which tenant live and make decisions. A stochastic frontier production function is used to estimate the technical efficiency of the wheat tenant farmers in the Gezira Scheme. A frontier production function of Cobb-Douglas type is specified for panel 1 data. The number of observations on the different farmers needs not to be the same. Estimates of the productive efficiency of individual tenant farmers are found to be very low, ranging between 0.274 and 0.713, and the bulk of them- about 52 percent- scored a rate of technical efficiency less than or equal to 0.400. Many factors contributed to this low rate of productive efficiency, among which it seems that management and polices are of significant role.