Tea Production Efficiency in Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam: A Case Study Between the Poor Household and Non-poor Household

Tea productivity in non-poor households is always higher than tea productivity in poor households. Low productivity is mainly due to farmers not exploiting the available technologies, resulting in lower production efficiency. Data-enveloped analysis (DEA) was used to evaluation the allocation, economic, and technical efficiency of tea cultivation in 210 non-poor farmers and 70 poor farmers in Thainguyen Province, Vietnam. Result has shown that most tea farms have allocation, economic and technical inefficiencies. DEA result also indicated that poor farmers are inefficient in tea cultivation with an average level of economic, allocation and technical efficiency of 70, 84.7 and 82.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, non-poor households have a higher level of efficiency with 94.3% technical effects, 85.4% distribution effects, and 80.5% cost effects. The difference in production resources is the cause of the difference tea production between poor and non-poor households. These findings suggested that tea production at the study site will be significantly improved by incorporating inputs to avoid wasting resources.