TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY AND TECHNOLOGY GAPS ON 'CLEAN AND SAFE' VEGETABLE FARMS IN NORTHERN THAILAND: A COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES
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"Clean and safe" agricultural products are an important issue among consumers, farmers and
governments. Many developing countries develop their produce at various points along the
‘clean’ continuum based on production practices related to use of synthetic chemicals.
Organic farming is applied to technologies with no chemicals or synthetic fertilisers used
during production or processing. It was initially developed by farmers and non-government
organisations in Thailand, and subsequently implemented by the Thai government through a
series of policies on clean produce to meet international standards. Safe-use and pesticide-free
practices lie between organic and conventional practices, and are possible steps when
converting conventional farms to organic farms.
We compare the technical efficiencies and technology gaps of the four farming systems in
northern Thailand of which three - organic, pesticide-free and safe-use - are designated ‘clean
and safe’. Farm-level data on vegetable production were collected from random samples of
farms using these technologies. A metafrontier model was estimated, enabling the estimation
of technical efficiencies and technology gap ratios (TGRs) for vegetable farms operating
under the different production systems. Conventional farms were expected to have the
highest mean TGR (smallest distance from the metafrontier) as they are least constrained in
the way they farm, and results bear out this expectation. The mean TGR for conventional
farms is 0.80, significantly higher than that for organic farms at 0.45. But all production
systems have farms lying on the metafrontier. In contrast to the TGR results, conventional
farms have the lowest mean technical efficiency relative to their group frontier (0.33) and
pesticide-free vegetable farms the highest (0.47), most likely reflecting the different degrees
of technical assistance provided to farmers in these groups. Organic farming is that farmers in
this group did not perform markedly worse than farmers in other groups in terms of
productivity. There are numerous organisations and projects providing assistance for ‘clean
and safe’ vegetable farming in northern Thailand. Scope exists to improve the performance of
farmers in all groups as technical efficiencies and TGRs of farms vary widely in all groups.
Improvements are needed for agronomic technology, supply chains, farmer capacity in
production and marketing, and effectiveness of technology transfer strategies.