Effect of Agricultural Credit Access on Rice Productivity: Evidence from the Irrigated Area of Anambe Basin, Senegal

Rice is an important staple food in many developing countries, especially in Senegal. However, rice production in Senegal only meet 20% of the domestic demand largely due to the poor performance of rice farmers and low productivity. Access to agricultural credit has strong impacts on the technical efficiency of farmers and would promote inputs and new technology adoption. But that is not clear enough in previous studies. This study investigates the impact of agricultural credit access on rice productivity and technical efficiency with 260 random sampled rice farmers from Anambe basin in Senegal. The Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) was adopted to estimate the technical efficiency. The results indicate that the inputs of rice production, including labor, pesticide, herbicides and fertilizer, have significant impacts on rice productivity. Furthermore, the results present that the average efficiency is of 0.813 and the inefficiency estimation model reveals that the influences of agricultural credit access, gender, education, ethnicity, use of improved seed and land tenure system on technical inefficiency of rice production are significant. Particularly, for the access to agricultural credit, rice farmers without agricultural credit would get 3.8% higher production inefficiency. The farmers with access to credit yield 37.32% higher rice production than their counterparts. Therefore, our study provides strong empirical evidence to promote agricultural credit in rice production.