Technical efficiency and food security of cucumber farmers in Phulpur upazila of Bangladesh

Abstract

Low productivity of cucumber is mostly due to the inability of the farm- ers to utilize the available technologies to the full scale. Profitability and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) were used to estimate profitability and technical efficiency, and ‘Modified’ OECD scale was used to measure calorie intake level of the 60 cucumber farming households from Sorchapur and Nakagau villages under Phulpur upazila of Mymensingh district. The study indicated that cucumber cultivation is profitable agribusiness, but many of the cucumber farms have shown technical inefficiency problems. The socioe- conomic analyses showed that 50% of the respondents were aged between 30-45 years, 55% households have medium family size, 60% of them were illiterate and 71.67% respondent’s primary occupation was agriculture. The average cucumber cultivated area was 50.18 decimal. The profitability analy- sis showed that the average ha⁻¹ season⁻¹ yield was 45290 kg, total cost of production was estimated Tk 509847; while the gross margin and net return were Tk 231877 and Tk 169503, respectively. The study also showed that on an average, the mean technical efficiency of cucumber was 0.7367 which represents that 26.33% inefficiency existed in the study area. About 11.67% of the sample households consumed an average of 1539.24 kcal person⁻¹ d⁻¹ which indicate they were ultra poor (<1600 kcal). About 15% of the sample households consumed an average of 1797.13 kcal person⁻¹ d⁻¹, they were in the hard-core poor group and 20% of the households consumed an average 2077.53 kcal person⁻¹ d⁻¹, they were in the absolute poor group (1805 - 2122 kcal). Besides the three poor groups, about 53.33% of the sample households consumed an average 2346.69 kcal person⁻¹ d⁻¹, and they were non-poor. These findings suggest that providing training to farmers to be technically efficient would significantly improve cucumber production in the research location, and that the government should formulate appropriate food security policies for rural areas.