Technical Efficiency and Profitability of Cassava Production in Delta State: A Stochastic Frontier Production Function Analysis

The study empirically examines the production efficiency of cassava farmers in Delta State, Nigeria, using stochastic frontier analysis. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 120 farmers. The result showed that 68.3% of cassava farmers fell within the age range of 40-59 years, majority (63.3%) of them were females, 69.2% had formal education, 51.7% had 6-10 years farming experience, 62.5% had household size of 6-10 persons, 70% did not belong to cooperative society, 88.3% of them had farm size between 0.1-0.9 ha, 76.7% did not have access to credit and 74.2% also did not have extension contact. A mean technical efficiency of 67% was recorded. The results imply that the average efficiency of cassava production could be improved by 33% through better use of existing resources and technology. The result showed that the return to scale was 1.306.The gamma coefficient was 0.86, implying that 86% of variation of cassava output from the production frontier was accounted by the technical inefficiency of the farmers. The major factors which influenced the farmers technical efficiency were farm size, planting material and capital while farming experience, level of education, access to credit, gender, age of farmer and household size exerted a significant effect on their inefficiency level. The major problems faced by the farmers were inadequate finance, inaccessibility to credit, inadequate access to improved varieties and high cost of inputs. The study deduced that the gross margin and net farm incomes were 155,726.34 a and 147,464.84 with BCR of 2.38, suggesting that cassava production is profitable. It is recommended that more farmers should venture into cassava production as a means of wealth creation and employment generation.