On Tuesday, 28 November 2017, ASE hosted its weekly Academic Seminar to discuss the paper, “Inefficiency of manual weeding in rainfed rice systems affected by parasitic weeds” presented by Dr Simon N’cho, an agricultural economist from IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Tamale, Ghana).

Dr. Simon presented a study highlighting the importance of rice worldwide and especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where its production faces many constraints. The main objective of the paper was to identify sources of inefficiency in a rice production system characterized by the presence of parasitic weeds. The study was conducted in two countries of Sub-Saharan Africa: Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. Dr. Simon focused on the analytical framework used in the paper to introduce the students to the estimation techniques of technical efficiency such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) bootstrapping. The results didn’t find evidence that manual weeding decreased the technical inefficiency of weeding labor on an infested farm, but have showed substantial technical inefficiencies and scale inefficiencies of weeding labor within rainfed rice productions system in the two countries.