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Energy efficiency along with friendly agricultural production is becoming one of the priority concerns of many countries in the world including Vietnam. The objective of this study was to estimate energy indicators and to determine the number of optimum energy inputs of arrowroot farms in Backan province regarding different regions and farm categories by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. Findings unveiled that arrowroot farms in Nari district had high energy indicators, i.e., energy ratio, energy productivity, net energy, as compared to other farms in Babe district. The technical and pure technical efficiency and the amount of potential GHG emission reduction found to be higher in Babe district than that in Nari district. Farms in Nari district had opportunities to reduce energy input with slightly higher than that in Babe district (54.54% and 53.61%, respectively). Regarding farm sizes, other than specific energy, small arrowroot farms had the highest energy indicators as compared to other farm size groups. Thus, small farms had the quantity of optimum energy input (392.76 MJ acre-1), saving energy (509.70 MJ acre-1) and amount of GHG emission reduction (4.26 kg CO2-eq/acre) which were more than the others. Based on the results of this study, the suggested solutions to improve the energy efficiency and reduce the adverse effects of arrowroot production to the environment should focus on developing the extension activities as well as short technological training courses for farmers addressing on raising awareness of energy conservation when applying chemical fertilizer and other input factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assessed the change in productivity and environmental efficiency of agriculture for nine East Asian countries for the time period from 2002 to 2010. Data were collected and then analysed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) approaches, including Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) index and slacks-based measure (SBM) with the consideration of undesirable outputs. The results showed that there existed relatively large differences in productivity growth and environmental performance in the agricultural sector between countries in the sample. Overall, the countries examined in the present study experienced a decline in TFP due to decreases in technical efficiency. Taiwan, Japan, and Korea were found to show growths in productivity and fully efficient environmental performances throughout the study period, while Thailand was identified as having the lowest environmental efficiency score. Therefore, agriculture production and operation models in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea could serve as good references for the other six countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study was aimed at estimating efficiency of rice farms in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam using data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. In this regard, data for the crop year 2014 were collected from 400 rice farms. The findings showed that the average efficiency scores were 80.9 percent for technique, 90.7 percent for allocation, 73.4 percent for cost, and 83.2 percent for scale, respectively, of rice producers. There were very few farms (1.25 percent) which were fully allocative and cost efficient, suggesting that majority of the farms have potential to improve their efficiency in terms of technique, allocation, cost and scale. The primary cause of inefficiency in the rice farms was attributed to technique, implying that higher cost efficiency might be achieved by improving technical efficiency. Further, the regression results indicated that rice farm size, credit access, and training were found to have significantly negative effects on technical and cost efficiency of farms. Therefore, this study arrived at suggestion that the quality of credit access and training programs need to be upgraded for improving technical and cost efficiency of the farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]