An Empirical Study of Cocoa Production in Ondo State, Nigeria

The decline and inconsistency in cocoa output in Ondo State motivated this study. As a result, the study described the socio-economic characteristics and measured the level of technical efficiency in cocoa production for 2017 in Ondo State, Nigeria. A parametric frontier model (DEA) under Constant Returns to Scale was used. Using a two-stage sampling procedure. 40% of the communities with the highest level of cocoa production in the selected local government areas (LGAs) were purposively selected and a simple random sampling of 24% of cocoa farmers from the communities chosen to give a sample size of 210 cocoa farmers. The data were collected using a structured questionnaire assisted with a personal interview schedule and analyzed using descriptive statistics and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The result showed that male farmers dominated cocoa production with a mean age of 52years, the majority (99.05%) were married, the mean household size of 7, the age of cocoa farm was 47years, the farming experience of 23 years, respectively and most (79.05%) of the farmers had formal education. The DEA input-oriented efficiency measurement showed a mean farmers’ Technical Efficiency of 0.85, indicating an efficiency gap and that the farmers were operating about 15 % below the frontier. Most (76%) of the farmers had Technical Efficiency (TE) between 0.80 – 0.90, with minimum and maximum Technical Efficiency (TE) of 0.62 and 1.00 respectively. The study concluded that cocoa farmers and farms were aging implying less energy available for input utilization in production and poor output obtained from the plantations in the Study Area, hence, technical inefficiency. Rehabilitation of cocoa plantations and encouragement of youth participation by relevant agencies and government through inputs subsidization and provision of grants will help to raise technical efficiency in cocoa production in the Study Area.