PROFITABILITY AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF BORO RICE CULTIVATION IN SOME SELECTED AREAS OF NETROKONA DISTRICT

Abstract

Bangladesh is predominantly an agricultural country. The dominant food crop in Bangladesh is rice, accounting 75 percent of agricultural land use. The purpose of the study was to describe the socio-economic characteristics; to examine the profitability and technical efficiency and to identify problem faced by the farmers in boro rice production in the study area. Primary data were collected from randomly selected 60 farmers from six villages under Durgapur upazila of Netrokona district. Both tabular and statistical analyses were applied in this study. The study revealed that boro rice production is profitable. The cost of production of boro rice was Tk. 112725.01 per hectare. Gross return of boro rice was Tk. 138000 per hectare, gross margin of boro rice was Tk.58619.39 per hectare and that of net return was Tk. 25274.99 per hectare. Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) was 1.22 which implies that a boro rice producer could earn Tk 1.22 with the investment of Tk 1.00. The Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production function was used for this study to measure technical efficiency of boro rice producers. The coefficients of parameters like hired labor, urea and insecticide were negative, where family labor, machinery and MoP were found positive. The study also identified some problems and constraints faced by the boro rice farmers and suggested some recommendations to improve the present production situation so that yield of boro rice would possibly be increased.