Do Climate Change Adaptation Strategies Deliver Benefits for Farms? Compelling Evidence from the Efficiency-Profitability Relationship in Different Rice-growing Seasons in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT : The aim of the present research is to analyze the connection between climate change adaptation, technical efficiency, and the profitability in the case of Bangladesh's three most important rice-growing seasons—Aus, Aman, and Boro. The study is conducted leveraging farm-based data. Initially, the technical efficiency scores are computed using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), and then the analysis proceeds to investigate the interaction of climate change adaptation and efficiency in terms of their impact on profitability. A half-normal inefficiency distribution is considered for the base stochastic production frontier, whereas a truncated normal specification is used for robustness checks to determine the effect of the alternative distributional assumptions on the results. Furthermore, climate adaptation is evaluated in two ways: firstly, by counting the total number of strategies applied, and secondly, through a standard adaptation index, both methods ensuring that the conclusions are not affected by scale effects. The empirical results unearth wide-ranging technical inefficiency present in all rice varieties, thus, opening a huge area for the improvement of productivity. Climate adaptation does not uniformly impact efficiency and profitability among crop-growing seasons. In rice farming for the Aus variety, adaptation and technical efficiency seem not to have any effect on profit outcomes at a statistically significant level. However, in the case of Aman rice, adaptation causes a decrease in the short-run technical efficiency, which may be due to learning and adjustment costs, while the efficiency improvements are still the positively linked to the profits. In Boro rice, the technical efficiency is the main factor for the profit increase, while the climate adaptation does not directly affect either efficiency or profit. The above-mentioned findings are strong even when different distributions of inefficiency and adaptation measures are considered. The study, in a nutshell, discloses the diverse impacts of climate adaptation and technical efficiency throughout rice production systems and points to the necessity of crop-specific strategies for the potential realization of efficiency and farm income and profit gain alongside climate change.