FAO Agricultural Development Economics Working Paper, No. 23-07.

Food insecurity is one of the world’s greatest challenges and there is still a strong debate on which structural strategies should be adopted to cope with it. In sub-Saharan Africa food insecurity is accompanied by very poor technical efficiency of farmers, particularly smallholders, resulting in below potential agricultural profits. The food security and technical efficiency challenges can be tackled with some common solutions: this paper studies the relation between agricultural technical efficiency and food insecurity in Nigeria using a two-step approach. It first estimates farmers’ technical efficiency, employing a profit stochastic frontier framework on three waves of Nigeria’s General Household Survey between 2010 and 2016. Then, it assesses the impact of these estimates on mild, moderate and severe measures of food insecurity at the province level, thanks to both probit and biprobit models with a rich set of covariates, including demographic, economic, agricultural and geographic characteristics. The results suggest that technical efficiency improvements are particularly effective in reducing the more severe types of food insecurity: an increase by 1 percent in technical efficiency reduces moderate (severe) food insecurity by 0.40 (0.45) percent. Therefore, policies aimed at improving farmers’ technical efficiency can also have a strong impact on reducing food insecurity.