Economic Analysis of Cassava Production in Cambodia

The research is conducted to describe the socioeconomic characteristics of Cassava farmers, analyse the costs and returns in Cassava production, and determine the resource use efficiency of Cassava production in Cambodia. Multistage random sampling technique was used to select a sample size of 568 respondents for the study. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics such as frequency counts and percentages. Most of respondent are male (73 %) with 84.4 % of the farmers married, having family size of 3-6 (80.3 %) people, using mostly hired labour. More than 50 % of the respondents have formal education, with 6 years and above farming experience, less than 50 % of them had some input from non-farm actives. Gross margin result indicate that farmer obtain a net return of 1, 269, 487 riels per hectares with a benefit-cost ratio of 1.31. All variables input are significant with different level. The most important variable include Household size, Land size, labour and capital. Findings showed that the farmers were inefficient in their resource use. This suggests that for the farmers to increase cassava output in the area, they should employ more of the productive resources such as improved varieties and labour to boost their productivity. The research concludes that cassava farming is profitable and so new innovation should be passed to the farmers to adopt.