TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF SORGHUM PRODUCTION THE CASE OF MELKA BELLO DISTRICT, EAST HARARGHE, OROMIA NATIONAL REGIONAL STATE, ETHIOPIA

In the last two decades, the smallholder crop production in Ethiopia has enjoyed relative growth in acreage, output, and number of growers, but productivity has remained low. In Ethiopia, there are different empirical studies on efficiency analysis in different agroecologies, the results shows that there is significant difference in technical efficiency and inefficiency variables. What is scarce in the literature is that their conclusion is not consistent with one another. Therefore, this study estimates the technical efficiency of sorghum farmers and identifies their determinants in Melka Bello District, East Hararghe, Ethiopia. The primary data collected from 138 randomly sampled sorghum-producing households durig 2019/2020 production year were employed for analysis. Cobb-Douglas frontier model with inefficiency variables were estimated by maximum likelihood method. The result indicated that mean technical efficiency of the farmers in the production of sorghum is 76%. This reveals that there exists a possibility to increase the sorghum output by 24% by existing resources and technological level. The discrepancy ratio gamma (γ) was to be 89.5%, which measures the relative deviations of the sorghum output from the frontier due to individual inefficiency. This implies that about 89.5% of variations in sorghum production farmer were attributed to technical inefficiency. The maximum likelihood parameter estimates showed that the amount of seed, land, oxen day, Npsb fertilizer, and labour forces were positively and significantly influenced sorghum output. The inefficiency parameters shows that extension contact, fertility status of soil, age, education, soil and water conservation negatively affect technical inefficiency. The implication is that improvement in these variables reduces technical inefficiency. However, TLU positively and significantly affected the level technical inefficiency. Hence, local government should be provide a necessary supports to farmers such as formal as well as informal education, extension visits, soil managements and conservation.