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Estimating the potential to close yield gaps through increased efficiency of chickpea production in Ethiopia

Food Security volume 14, pages 1241–1258 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

Improved cultivars and agronomic practices have significantly increased chickpea production in Ethiopia in recent decades. Enhanced availability of chickpeas in Ethiopia, therefore, contributes to food, nutrition, and income security of the country. However, we know relatively little about the extent to which farmers have harnessed the full potential of these improved technologies. In this paper, we compare the technical efficiencies and technological gap ratios of chickpea farming in three major chickpea-producing areas of Ethiopia using a two-step meta frontier model. Based on regionally representative data from 681 chickpea-growing farm households in the three regions, we show regional differences in the technical efficiencies, technological gap ratios, and meta technical efficiencies (MTEs). We examined the drivers of these different production levels and identified ways to increase chickpea production while minimizing yield gaps. Improving technical efficiency through improving farmers’ access to improved seed, offering farmers need-based and gender-responsive extension support, encouraging their participation in technology development programs, and appropriate rainwater management would all contribute to harnessing the full potential of improved chickpea cultivars in Ethiopia.

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Notes

  1. Technical efficiency is the effectiveness with which a given set of inputs is used to produce an output. A farm is said to be technically efficient if the farm is producing the maximum output from the given quantity of inputs, such as labour, capital, and technology.

  2. The ratio of a particular farm’s production frontier to the meta-frontier is defined as the technology gap ratio (Huang et al., 2014).

  3. 4 kert = 1 hectare (ha).

  4. NPS is a new compound fertilizer recently used in Ethiopia containing nitrogen, phosphorous and Sulphur with the ratio of 19% N, 38% P2O5 and 7% S.

  5. Technically, NPS and pesticide use data are not used directly in the model; more specifically, they were used in the form of \(Ln(max\left({input}_{i}, 1-{D}_{i}\right))\) where \(i\) is the particular input.

  6. The LR statistic is defined by, \(\lambda=-2\left[\ln\left( ^{L_{Ho}}/_{L_{\it{H1}}}\right)\right]=-2\left[\ln{L_{Ho}}-\ln{L_{H\mathit1}}\right]\), where \(ln{L}_{Ho}\) is the value of the log‐likelihood function for the stochastic frontier estimated by pooling the data for all groups under the homoscedastic variance component, and \(ln{L}_{\mathit{H1}}\) is the sum of the values of the log‐likelihood functions for the separate group frontiers (Battese et al., 2004, O’Donnell et al., 2008) with a chi‐square (\({\chi}^{2}\)) distribution with degrees of freedom \(d={\textstyle\sum_{j=1}^J}\;dim(\beta^j)-dim(\beta^M)\), where \(\mathrm{dim}(.)\) is the dimension of the parameter. (Huang & Lai, 2017).

  7. The table value of Chi‐square (\({\chi }^{2}\)) distribution with degrees of freedom 38 at 0.1% level is 70.703.

  8. This is a necessary step of the meta-frontier analysis procedure. In the cases when the likelihood ratio test doesn’t not show the difference in technology use among the regions, then it is not suggested to use meta-frontier analysis for the study of technical efficiency.

  9. We used the “frontier” package in R developed by Coelli and Henningsen (2013).

  10. Theoretically, TE score could be anywhere between 1 and 0, with the most efficient farm’s TE score is close to one. Here the highest TE score is 0.9999, and the lowest is 0.1544. therefore, the variation is very high for individual farm households. However, the average TE score of the three regions is between 0.4936 and 0.5678. It may be noted that TE is not indicating the level of technology use but the efficiency of input use; the low TE score farms might be using different inputs inefficiently.

  11. Production frontiers involved here are defined by the model and within the sample values. This implies that there may be techniques of production, not practiced by any of the farmers in the sample, which could yield a much higher output for the same level of input.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Thomas Falk, D. Kumaracharyulu, Anthony Whitbread, and Tilahun Amede of ICRISAT for their inputs; Conrad Murendo, Nigussie Girma, Chichaybelu Mekasha for guiding the fieldwork, and Ketema Alemu and Tesfashbamlak Mola for data collection. Funding from BMGF through Tropical Legumes-III (Grant ID- OPP1114827) and CRP Grain Legumes and Dryland Cereals (GLDC) through CGIAR Fund Donors and bilateral funding agreements is gratefully acknowledged. The authors sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, 502 324, Hyderabad, India

    Shalander Kumar, Abhishek Das, Michael Hauser, Geoffrey Muricho, Tulu Degefu, Asnake Fikre, Chris Ojiewo & Rajeev K. Varshney

  2. University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Michael Hauser

  3. Debre Zeit Agricultural Research Center, EIAR, P.O. Box 32, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

    Setotaw Ferede

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  1. Shalander Kumar
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Kumar, S., Das, A., Hauser, M. et al. Estimating the potential to close yield gaps through increased efficiency of chickpea production in Ethiopia. Food Sec. 14, 1241–1258 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-022-01285-w

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Keywords

  • Chickpea production
  • Technical efficiency
  • Stochastic meta-frontier
  • Technology gap
  • Yield gap
  • Potential production loss
  • Ethiopia