Allocative Efficiency of Resource Use by Cassava Farmers in Wamba Local Government Area, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

The national policy objective of substituting wheat with cassava to cut down on food import bill can only be achieved by enhancing the productivity of cassava farmers who are mainly small scale farmers. But critical to output growth is resource-use efficiency. Efficiency of resource-use enhances farm productivity, guarantee food security and consequently poverty reduction. Thus, in attaining the aforementioned policy objective it is only imperative to ascertain the resourceuse efficiency of this category of farmers. It is against this backdrop that this survey is carried out to evaluate the allocative efficiency of resource use by cassava farmers in Wamba Local Government Area of Nasarawa State, Nigeria. This was achieved by ascertaining the socio-economic characteristics of these farmers and estimating their production function to provide coefficients for determining the allocative efficiency of resource-use. Data were generated through the administration of questionnaire to 126 randomly selected farmers in the five villages purposely selected. The findings reveal that resources that account for over 80 per cent (R2) variation in output are underutilized and this was discovered
to be at variancewith the national policy objective on cassava production. It is
therefore recommended among others that: agricultural credit should be readily available, training and retraining programmes for farmers, and adequate funding of research institutions.