Impact of land tenure security on technical efficiency for maize production: the case of Central province in Zambia

Abstract

The impact of land tenure security on smallholder crop productivity in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) is inconclusive. In Zambia, maize production which serves to satisfy national food security requirements and the generation of foreign exchange from maize exports to regional markets is a big challenge, whereby the majority maize producers are smallholders under an insecure customary land tenure system. We employed an endogeneity-robust stochastic production frontier (SPF) framework to examine the effect of land tenure security on technical efficiency (TE) for smallholder maize producers in Zambia's Central province. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) was used to treat sample class imbalance between Title Deed Certificate (TDC) holders and non-holders. Our main findings show that use of land on TDCs, including that on customary land tenure types, such as chief-authorized and inherited land had significant impacts on mean TE expansion for smallholder maize production. The production function showed that only chemical fertilizer had a significant positive marginal effect on maize output under drought conditions. Use of oxen helped to expand average maize output. A 90.15% average TE implied that only a small maize output improvement was still possible, using same inputs and technology, under same climatic conditions. We associated the 3–4 ha TE dip with productive capacity transition from subsistence to market-oriented farming. For policy improvements, we recommended the legal recognition of some customary land tenure types, alongside TDC issuances. Lastly, we recommended the expansion of smallholder fertilizer support, and scale efficiency improvement, including minimum land use rate legislation, for eventual maize output expansion in Zambia