Abstract:
Vanilla is one of the economically important crops in Sri Lanka
although it is mainly confined as a home garden crop grown in mid
and low country wet zone. Farmer productivity is one of the most
important concerns in vanilla cultivation. Thus, the productivity of
Vanilla farmers can be raised by improvement in efficiency in the
short run. As a result of the near absence of empirical information on
farm-level technical efficiency in small scale Vanilla Production in
the country generally and Kandy District in particular, a Stochastic
Frontier function which incorporated inefficiency factors was
estimated using a Maximum Likelihood technique to provide
estimates of technical efficiency and its determinants using data
obtained from 80 Vanilla farmers in Ganga Ihala Korale Divisional
Secretariat division since it has one of the largest numbers of smallholder vanilla producers in the country. The results reveal that
Vanilla farmers are not fully technically efficient and the mean
technical efficiency estimated is 37.32%. Estimated results of the
inefficiency model show that experience and educational level of the
vanilla farmers significantly influence the farmers ‘efficiency
positively whereas age of the farmers contributes to increase the
inefficiency. The findings imply that policies that would encourage
youth to engage in vanilla farming and improvement in human
capital should be made and implemented.
