Impact of Adverse Health on Agricultural Productivity of Farmers in Kainji Basin North-Central Nigeria Using a Stochastic Production Frontier Approach

This study examined the impact of adverse health on the productivity of farmers in Kainji Lake Basin North Central Nigeria. It made use of Stochastic frontier production model. The technical efficiency of farmers falls in the range of 0.28-0.99 with a mean of 0.85. This implies that the efficiency of farmers can be improved at the available technology by about 15.1% in the short run. With the exception of seed and insecticide, other variables in the efficiency model have positive coefficients with fertilizer having the highest coefficient. This probably suggests an overuse of seed and insecticides relative to other inputs and that fertilizer is an important variable input in the agricultural output of farmers in the study area. It was observed that gamma (a measure of variance of output from the frontier attributed to efficiency) is 0.114. This implies that 0.886 or 88.6% of total variation in output is due to technical inefficiency. The adverse health variable in the inefficiency model has the largest positive coefficient and is statistically significant at p<0.05. This implies that health has a greater share in the inefficiency of the farmers and calls for attention of policy makers in Nigeria.