Technical Efficiency and Its Determinants Among Smallholder Soybean Farmers in Mozambique

Mozambique has prioritized soybean within its agricultural strategy, yet smallholder yields remain far below attainable levels and the share of that shortfall attributable to inefficient use of existing inputs has not been quantified. This study estimates farm-level technical efficiency (TE) and its determinants for 926 smallholder soybean farmers drawn from the 2023 Integrated Agricultural Survey covering Zambezia, Tete, Manica and Niassa, the provinces supplying the great majority of national output. A translog stochastic production frontier with a half-normal inefficiency term was fitted by maximum likelihood in a single step, with the variance of the inefficiency term parameterized as a function of farm and household characteristics. Approximately 72% of the residual variation separating farmers from the frontier was attributable to technical inefficiency rather than to random noise. Mean TE was 0.40 (range 0.02 to 0.81), an efficiency gap of about 60 percentage points, corresponding to a proportional output increase of approximately 147% from better use of existing inputs. Returns to scale over the continuous inputs entering the frontier were decreasing (approximately 0.74). Land was the dominant continuous frontier input and irrigation shifted the frontier upward. Farmers in the Central zone were more efficient than those in the North (0.43 against 0.36). The sex of the household head and region were the only determinants significant on both the coefficient and bootstrap tests, while credit access, though largest in marginal effect, was supported by the bootstrap interval alone. The findings support geographically targeted extension and gender-sensitive support.