Exploring opportunity cost of conversion to eco-friendly farming system: the case of Samsun and Adana provinces of Turkey

Çağatay Yıldırım (), Hatice Türkten, Vedat Ceyhan, Ela Atış, Mehmet Hasdemir, H. Ece Salalı, Yarkın Akyüz and Figen Güngör
Additional contact information
Çağatay Yıldırım: Ondokuz Mayıs University
Hatice Türkten: Ondokuz Mayıs University
Vedat Ceyhan: Ondokuz Mayıs University
Ela Atış: Ege University
Mehmet Hasdemir: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
H. Ece Salalı: Ege University
Yarkın Akyüz: Ege University
Figen Güngör: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2021, vol. 23, issue 2, No 13, 1447-1460

Abstract: Abstract For last decade, adverse effects of agricultural practices to environment have been critically important worldwide. However, there has been very limited information about sufficiency of government subsidies and effects of environmental consideration on productive efficiency. The purposes of the study are, therefore, to calculate the opportunity cost of conversion to eco-friendly farming in Samsun and Adana provinces of Turkey, to determine the effects of participating the program on the farm level production efficiency and to reveal link farmers’ satisfaction and opportunity cost of participating to EFALP. The bulk of data were collected from randomly selected 168 farms by using structured questionnaire during the production year of 2015. The difference between the net revenue of participants and non-participant farms was attributed to opportunity cost of conversion to eco-friendly farming system. Data envelopment analysis was used to calculate the efficiency measures such as technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and economic efficiency for similar participants and non-participant farms, which were selected by using cluster analysis. Research result showed that scores of economic efficiency, allocative efficiency and technical efficiency were 0.37, 0.84 and 0.45 in Adana, while that of Samsun were 0.4, 0.77 and 0.60, respectively. The share of subsidies for environmental protection in total subsidies for participant farms in Samsun and Adana was 88.6% and 55.6%, respectively. The opportunity cost of environment protection for average farm was €4454.3 in Adana and €502.5 in Samsun. The quantity of sacrifice for protecting environment in Adana is higher than that of Samsun. Farm level sufficiency of environmental subsidies was 10.6% in Adana, while that of Samsun was more than a hundred. Research results also showed that government environmental subsidies were not allocated efficiently since EFALP ignored the opportunity cost of conversion and its spatial differences. It was clear from the evidence based on the research findings that the quantity of sacrifice for protecting environment was the basic reason for farmers’ satisfaction from EFALP. Rethinking the mechanism of EFALP considering spatial variability of farms’ sacrifice for protecting the environment may reinforce the EFALP. Research suggested a new option that is allocating the government payment associated with an opportunity cost of conversion to balance spatial satisfaction among farms included EFALP and to increase financial efficiency of the EFALP budget.

Keywords: Opportunity cost of conversion; Eco-friendly farming system; Productive efficiency; Farmers’ satisfaction; Turkey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-020-00630-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:23:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10668-020-00630-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-020-00630-3

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().