0023-6152

AA00697606

4553

Unrefereed

0023-6152

AA00697606

The Mekong Delta plays a very important role in the rice production sector of Vietnam. However, income of rice grower in the Mekong Delta and Vietnam as well is still very low. Finding out the way to increase the efficiency of rice production in order improve income for farmers and to enhance the comparative advantage of Vietnam's rice industry has become the most crusial issue. A stochastic frontier production function uncorporating a model for technical inefficiency effects (Battese and Coelli, 1995) is applied to field survey data on 120 paddy farmers of the Mekong Delta. We could infer that there exists difference in the level of technical efficiency across season and size of operational holding as well in paddy farming in the Mekong Delta. The mean technical efficiencies of 86.23%, 79.55% and 80.24% were achieved by paddy farms in winter-spring, spring-summer and summer- autumn, respectively in the Mekong Delta showing the scope for increasing paddy production by 13.8%,20.45% and 19.76% with the present technology itself. Regarding to variables affecting stochastic frontier, it was found that quantity of seed, active nitrogen and expense for pesticide had negative impact on the rice fiel. On the other hand quantity of active phosphate ans potassium and expense for hired machine have positive impact on rice field. However those inputs were all allocated inefficiently. The technical inefficiency effects in the stochastic models are found to be statistically significant, dummy variables of land size, rice variety use,IPM adoptaion and sowing technique together wiith availability of cresit are found to have positive impact on technical effeciency. The average yield loss due to technical inefficiency was relatively high with 727.03 and 705.93 kg per hectare in winter-spring and summer-autumn crops respectively and farmers who operate with farm size of 1-3 hectare could achieve highest efficiency and lowest yield loss. These results may help agricultural policy makers foumulate strategies.