Abstract

This study was carried out to evaluate the technical efficiency of cocoa farms in Cross River State, Nigeria. Multi stage sampling technique was used to select four local government areas (LGAs) and fifteen cocoa farmers per LGA, to give a total of sixty farmers. The sampled LGAs constitute about 30% of the local government areas in the State. Data collection was carried out with the aid of a structured and pre-tested questionnaire by trained enumerators in 2009. Data collected include socio-economic characteristics of the sampled households, cocoa farm assets, production practices and costs. Farm visits were undertaken and the area of each cocoa field was measured with GPS.  Data were analysed using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Results showed that 17.02% of the cocoa farms were technically efficient based on constant return to scale technical efficiency, while 68.09% were technically efficient based on variable return to scale technical efficiency. About 21.28% of the cocoa farms were scale efficient. The DEA output revealed that 17.02% of the sampled cocoa farms were both technically and scale efficient and were hence operating at the most productive scale size. About 57.45% of the cocoa farms were operating at sub-optimal condition. The technically inefficient farms should emulate the operating practices of the most productive farms, so as to improve their performance.

Key words: Cocoa farm, technical efficiency, data envelopment analysis, Nigeria.