Effect of Ill-health on Technical Efficiency of Food Crop Farmers in Ondo State, Nigeria

This study examined the effect of ill-health on technical efficiency of food crop farmers in Ondo State, Nigeria. Primary data were obtained from 300 randomly selected food crop farmers using multistage sampling procedure. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Findings revealed that respondents were still in their economic active age with mean age 46.5 years. Most (82.3%) of the farmers were male and 44.3% of the sampled farmers have primary education. Majority (70.0%) of the respondents had access to health care services out of which 50.7% had access to government maternity. 58.3 percentage of the respondents lost about 5 farming days due to illness of a member while majority (93.3%) of the farmers reported ill-health due to malaria, cold and catarrh. Farmers’ mean annual expenditure transportation to the nearest health care Centre and medication were ₦137.00 and ₦4,228.83 respectively. Mean technical efficiency was estimated to be 0.627 and the returns to scale computed as the sum of output elasticity for all inputs was estimated as 1.6506, indicating increasing return to scale. SFA showed that travel cost to health care centres (p<0.01) and cost of disease treatment (p<0.05) significantly decreased efficiency. The study concluded that cost of disease treatment decreased farmers’ efficiency. Therefore, government is encouraged to site health care facilities closer to farmers and ensure that the facilities are adequately equipped with modern medical equipment, drug and trained medical personnel. This should be accessible by farmers to improve efficiency.