Economic efficiency of small-scale wheat production in Jigawa state, Nigeria

Africa’s most populous country has failed to grow more food for its fast-rising population. With 420,000 metric tons of wheat produced in Nigeria in 2020, the country is still far from bridging its 4.6 million metric tons annual wheat gap. Increasing wheat production is a challenge for the nation to fulfill the food requirements of its growing population. So far literature has shown a rise in research on wheat in different parts of Nigeria, with a paucity of information on the economic efficiency of wheat production in the study area, and the country in general. To bridge these knowledge and empirical gaps, this research investigates the economic efficiency of wheat production in Jigawa State of Nigeria using information gathered from a survey elicited by a well-structured questionnaire coupled with an interview schedule from 341 active wheat farmers selected through a multi-stage sampling technique. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data collected. Empirically, despite the wheat enterprise being profitable in the study area, farmers didn’t achieve the targeted goals of output maximization, cost minimization, and profit maximization as evident respectively by the technical, cost, and economic efficiency indexes. However, these goals were challenged by induced human risks viz. gender discrimination that affects women’s access to productive resources, poor labor productivity due to diminishing marginal returns associated with old age, capital consumption triggered by increased income, poor prioritization of wheat enterprise as a business, and vulnerable household size. Furthermore, the identified constraints mediating the links that affected the economic efficiency of wheat farmers were price/marketing, technological, managerial, and infrastructural risks. Therefore, for long-run sustainable wheat production, the responsibility lies on policymakers to concentrate more on marketing and technological risks challenging wheat production in the study area as empirically established by this research.