Effect of Soil and Water Conservation Techniques’ Adoption Intensity on Farmers’ Technical Efficiency in Burkina Faso: A Stochastic Meta-Frontier Approach

In the context of soil degradation, resilient and sustainable production systems are needed to address the challenges of food security and poverty reduction in rural areas. In this prospect, farmers adopted various soil and water conservation techniques (SWCTs) in their production systems. The objective of this article was to estimate and compare technology gap ratio (TGR) and meta-frontier technical efficiency (MTE) between three groups of cereal producers in Burkina Faso. They were divided regarding the adoption intensity of SWCTs (low, medium and high). The data used was collected by questionnaire survey on a sample of 335 farmers from May to July 2022. Meta-frontier approach was applied in order to deal with the heterogeneity of techniques’ intensity of adoption. The results showed that medium or high intensity farmers have a TGR equals to 1. Conversely, their MTE (60%) is lower than that of low-intensity farmers (70%). This evidence implies that SWCTs intensive producers are technically less efficient compared to less intensive ones. It comes out that the adoption of several SWCTs leads to a suboptimal use of a set of factors. These results suggest that agricultural development stakeholders should develop the agricultural counselling system oriented to the optimal use of production factors.