Analysis of factors affecting technical efficiency of A1 smallholder maize farmers under command agriculture scheme in Zimbabwe : the case of Chegutu and Zvimba Districts

In an effort to address the decline in maize productivity, the government of Zimbabwe in 2016/17 endorsed a special program for input support named command agriculture scheme (CAS). Against this background, the study questioned the beneficiaries' technical efficiency and factors that influence farmers to gravitate towards the frontier using Chegutu and Zvimba districts of Zimbabwe as case studies. The study used a cross-sectional survey of 240 households randomly selected through a three-stage multiple-sampling procedure. The single-stage modelling stochastic frontier approach was applied to assess technical efficiency of A1 smallholder command agriculture maize farmers. The study revealed that A1 smallholder command agriculture maize farmers in Chegutu and Zvimba districts were technically efficient at 85% and 94%, respectively. The major determinants of technical efficiency were basal fertilizer, labour, area allocated to maize production and topdressing fertilizer which all indicated a positive relationship. The main determinants of technical inefficiency were age, maize farming experience, level of education, marital status, occupation status and other sources of income. Results further revealed that farmers from Chegutu district had increasing returns to scale (1.43) while farmers from Zvimba district had decreasing returns to scale (0.54). The study therefore argues that despite the observed high technical efficiencies, Chegutu farmers could bridge their 15% gap between the observed output and the frontier output by focusing more on input usage with increasing returns to scale while Zvimba farmers could bridge their 6% gap by focusing more on socio-economic drivers of technical inefficiency given their decreasing returns to scale.