Technical efficiency, adoption and impact of organic farming practic-es: a case study of organic cotton farming in Burkina Faso

Abstract

Organic farming sector is presented today as an alternative to limit the numerous environmental challenges caused by conventional farming practices. Essentially based on farm biota for fertilization and the control of pests, this type of farming practice reduce considerably external contributions on the farm such as agricultural chemicals. Though its environmental efficiency have been well established, organic farming still poorly adopted all over the world. The potential of organic methods (crop rotation, natural enemies, and organic pesticides) to provide nutrients and insure pests and weed control is an important issue of the acceptance of organic farming. Given that organic farming practices are constrained in terms of inputs use, their ability to provide acceptable yields is questioned. Potential adopters wonder about the capacity of organic farming practices to derive productive inputs through only soil biological processes. In addition, the question of the economic impact of organic farming practices on farm household livelihoods is also a subject of debates. Based on these questionings, this study aims to examine the technical efficiency, the adoption and the impact of organic farming in the specific case of organic cotton production in Burkina Faso. Given that the adoption and diffusion of innovations is essentially an informational process, a merged framework of the theory of diffusion of innovations and the theory of planned behaviour serves as conceptual framework for this study. The adoption and impact of organic cotton production is investigated through an endogenous switching regression model to control for the endogeniety of the adoption decision while stochastic frontier analysis are applied to determine the technical efficiency of organic cotton farming and its exogenous determinants. The results of the study revealed that factors such as the experience in cotton farming, the education of the head of household, the household size, the gender of the head of household and the knowledge provided to cotton farmers through radio emissions affect negatively the decision to grow organic cotton. While the age of the head of household has a positive impact on the decision to grow organic cotton. Moreover the adoption of organic cotton farming has a significant positive impact on the returns on cotton production of organic cotton farmers but affect negatively their capacity to grow non-cotton crops. The analysis of the technical efficiency of organic cotton farmers revealed that the mean technical efficiency of organic cotton farmers is about 0.6538323 with a confidence interval of [0.026201; 0.9998788] at 95%. Farm size is an efficiency enhancing factor while the experience in cotton production, the distance from household to cotton farm and the soil fertility status are efficiency reducing factors.