Sugarcane production efficiency of small-scale farmers in Thailand

摘要

This paper estimates the production efficiency of sugarcane farmers in Thailand using a non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and primary data collected from 94 sugarcane farmer respondents during in the 2014/15 crop year. The empirical results suggest that Thai sugarcane farmers operate at 80.89% productive efficiency; that is, given their output quantity, farmers should reduce their input by 19.11% without changing their technology use. The findings concerning the returns to scale in sugarcane production show that farmers in 60.64% of observed sugarcane farms experience increasing returns to scale, implying smaller operations. Only 34.04% of observed sugarcane farms operate at an optimal scale, while 5.32% operate at decreasing returns to scale (i.e. larger operations). The values for allocation and cost efficiency are, on average, 0.3688 and 0.4004, respectively. The findings for cost efficiency indicate that Thai sugarcane farmers have the potential to reduce costs by 63.12%. Allocative inefficiency occurs due to the overuse of land, household labour, causal labour, machinery labour, seed, fertilizer and other inputs.