Impact of good agricultural practices on technical efficiency of Tea small holders
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Tea is pre-eminent among Sri Lanka’s plantation crops and it is one of the most important industries in the country in terms of employment and foreign exchange earnings. Sri Lanka’s tea small holders, who account for 76% of the national tea output, are the mainstay of Sri Lanka’s tea industry, are facing some serious problems like increasing cost of production and reducing marginal profits that will directly contribute towards reducing the national tea output in the future. However, given the high cost of production, there is a belief that it is very difficult to increase profitability without increasing costly inputs (Basnayake et al., 2002). Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) addresses environmental, social and economical sustainability and often in combination with effective input use, is one of the best ways to increase smallholder productivity without costly inputs (Poisot et al., 2004). Having identifying the importance of GAPs in tea industry, this study was conducted to find out the impact of GAP adoption on technical efficiency of tea small holders in Sri Lanka
Methodology
84 tea small holders were selected as the sample, among tea small holders in Kuruvita DS Division using multistage sampling. Four TI ranges (Wewalwaththa, Erathna, Eheliyagoda and Kiriella) in Kuruvita were selected and 21 tea small holders were selected from each TI range.
Data collection was carried out by using structured questionnaire. The questionnaire includes two basic parts, part one is consisted basic inputs to measure technical efficiency and other part is used to collect data to find about the adoption level of tea small holders to Good Agricultural Practices on tea cultivation. To measure GAP adoption level questions were prepared under 14 GAP principles specifically to tea cultivation as recommended by Tea Research Institute (Zoysa, 2008).
Stochastic Frontier Production model was used to measure the technical efficiency. STATA statistical package, Minitab software and Microsoft Excel were used to data analysis.
Description
Keywords
Agriculture, Export Agriculture, Crop Production, Crop Production Technology, Tea Industrials, Tea Technology