Effects of climatic conditions and agro-ecological settings on the productive efficiencies of small-holder farmers in Ethopia

This study argues that the adaptation measures farmers take to reduce the negative impacts of climate change do affect farmers’ efficiency of production. To support this argument, two steps were followed to understand how climatic factors especially long term average seasonal rainfall and temperature; and agro-ecological settings affect production efficiency in Ethiopian agriculture. In the first step, the stochastic frontier approach was employed to analyze the farm level technical efficiency. In the second step, the tobit regression model was adopted to analyze how climatic and agro-ecological settings affect efficiency scores derived from the first step. Results from the first step indicated that the surveyed farmers have an average technical efficiency of 0.50; with significant output elasticits of labor, draft power and tractor. Results from the tobit regression model showed that soil types, run-off, seasonal climatic conditions and agro-ecological settings affect technical efficiency in Ethiopian agriculture.