Durum Wheat Landraces as a Hedge Against Drought: On-Farm Costs, Efficiency and Downside Risk Among Smallholders in Semi-Arid Tunisia

Durum wheat landraces are still sown on many Tunisian smallholdings, and they are often credited with drought tolerance, yet little is known about how they perform on farms compared with improved cultivars. We surveyed 65 growers in Zaghouan, north-eastern Tunisia, after the 2017–2018 drought; 45 sowed landraces and 20 sowed improved cultivars. We compared costs, returns and crop failures, and estimated efficiency with group-frontier and metafrontier data envelopment analysis, bootstrap bias correction and a Simar–Wilson second stage, correcting for variety self-selection by inverse-probability weighting. Landrace growers spent 169 DT/ha less on inputs, lost their crop less often (21% against 40%) and faced a much smaller expected loss (−28 against −148 DT/ha). Average margins and technical efficiency did not differ. An apparent technological advantage of landraces in value terms vanished once grain was priced uniformly, which shows that it rested on a price premium. In this setting, landraces acted as a low-cost hedge against drought rather than a source of higher returns. On-farm conservation of this germplasm would gain from markets that reward landrace grain, certified landrace seed and drought insurance.