دانلود رایگان مقاله شکاف بهره وری بین سیستم های تولید گوشت گاو تجاری و سنتی

ABSTRACT

The beef cattle production system in Botswana is dualistic in structure in that it includes both traditional and commercial production systems, which are distinct from one another in terms of objectives, land tenure, technology, and management practices. The purpose of this paper is to measure the key performance indicators of beef cattle production systems in Botswana and explore the drivers of change in those indicators. We examine differences in productivity and production technologies between the two beef production systems. The results show that traditional farms are technically inefficient and that their technology lags behind that of commercial farms. The use of improved breeds, off-take rates and selling to the Botswana Meat Commission (which control the only exporting abattoirs in Botswana) were found to improve technical efficiency in the commercial production system, but only off-take rates had a positive effect on efficiency in the traditional production system. Both farming systems have the potential to overcome technology constraints and achieve the highest attainable productivity level through improvements in; beef cattle technologies, farmer capacity in production and marketing, and the effectiveness of the technology transfer process.

5. Conclusions

In this paper we have estimated productivity and technological differences between the commercial and traditional beef production systems in Botswana. Given that the two production systems use different sets of technologies (different in terms of human capital, economic infrastructure, resource endowments and socio-economic environment) two separate production frontiers were estimated. The results show that, as expected, both productive performance and production technologies are consistently lower in traditional farming than on commercial farms. Upon the computation of the metafrontier, commercial beef production technology is found to be more advanced than the traditional and it defines the potential production technology available for the beef industry in Botswana. On average productivity and production technologies have been gradually increasing in both systems, especially for the commercial farms, where productivity grew by 106% between 2004 and 2013, driven mainly by improvements in TE. Using regional dummy variables we found that the farms located in the Southern region; regardless of whether they are commercial or traditional farms tend to perform better than those from other regions. This is probably associated with their better access to nutritious vegetation and close proximity to Lobatse (which is the main marketing centre for the beef export market). We found that beef farms under freehold land tenure are generally more efficient than those under TGLP land tenure. The majority of farmers under freehold land tenure own individual tenure rights and are therefore more likely to make long-term investments in land and infrastructure which then contribute positively to production. The private tenure system also increases their probability of access to formal credit.