Technical Efficiency of Eggplant (Solanum melongina L.) Growing Farms in OMAN - An Opportunity to Stabilize the Agriculture Economy

Mouza Rashid Al-Salmi^1* and Saleem Kaseemsaheb Nadaf²

¹Undersecretary Office, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Water Resources, Sultanate of Oman.

²Former Advisor, Plant Gene Bank, Mawarid (Oman Animal and Plant Genetic Resources Center), Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, SQU, Sultanate of Oman.

Corresponding Author E-mail:alsalmi.mouza@gmail.com

Abstract:

Vegetables are important worldwide for food, nutrition, essential vitamins and minerals. Of the vegetables, eggplant (Solanum melongina L.) is economical for crop husbandry practices to increase the incomes of the farmers in both open fields and in plastichouses throughout Arabian Peninsula countries including Oman. It is also popular among the customers as it has moderate retail prices than other vegetables. Hence, a survey study was conducted to study the technical efficiency of eggplant-growing farms in the Sultanate of Oman in 2016 and 2017. 135 eggplant-growing farms were sampled following the multistage sampling method and the all required data viz. farm size (ha), fertilizer (kg/ha), labor (person-hours), seeds (kg/ha), irrigation water (cubic meter/day), electricity expense (Omani Rials/month) and chemicals used (kg/ha) besides farmers’ age, experience and education were collected through one to one interview with the farmers in their fields. The maximum likelihood method and the Cobb-Douglas Stochastic Frontier Production model were applied to the data. The output of Frontier 4.1 was the best fit, as evidenced by the significance of statistics sigma squared (p<0.05). The results showed that the mean technical efficiency for eggplant farms in Oman was about 80%, with a wide range from from 16% to 87% depending on the nature of farms with respect to facilities. There existed as much as 20% of scope of attaining 100 % output with the adaptation of good agricultural practices (GAP) by the young farmers of Oman. The study uniquely identified the absence of significant (p>0.05) influence of any agriculture inputs considered for the study.

Keywords:

Eggplant; Maximum likelihood method; Stochastic production frontier; Technical efficiency

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