ABSTRACT
This study focused on an analysis of rice farmers? access to output market and profit efficiency in Kano State, Nigeria. Three villages were randomly selected from three local Government Area and 164 farmers selected in the area. The result of the analysis shows that 42% of the respondents fall within the age range of 30-39years. Majority of the farmers (84%) were married; 65% of the farmers do not have formal education. The household size ranged from 1- 10 persons with 87% of the farmers having that size. About 71% had farming experience between 1-5 years. 90% did not have access to extension service, 76% of the farmers had a farm size between 0.1 - 5 hectares while 79% were not members of any cooperative society. The result of the study revealed that about 82% of the rice farmers sold their produce to rural assemblers, 5% of the rice farmers sold to whosalers, 6% of them sold to retailers while 7% sold their produce to processors. The ordered probit model was used to estimate parameters of the determinants of farmers? choices among alternative rice output market outlets by rice farmers in Kano state. The pseudo R-squared value indicates that 51% of the variation in the farmers? choices among alternative rice output market outlets by rice farmers was explained by the independent variables. Farmers? choices among alternative output market outlets was significantly determined by educational status of the household head, access to credit, cooperative membership, distance to market, quantity of output produced by the farmers and market price of rice. The result of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression estimates of the factors influencing the quantity of rice supplied to each identified market outlet of rice farmers showed that quantity of rice produced, educational status, distance to market and market price were factors that significantly influences each of the identified market outlets. The maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of the stochastic profit frontier model for each identified market outlet revealed that rural assembler market outlet had the best profit efficiency. 58% of the variation in actual profit from maximum profit (profit frontier) among rice farmers was due mainly to differences in farmers? practices rather than random variability. The major constraints identified on production and marketing in the study area were inadequate supply of improved seed (78%), inadequate capital (54.3%) while marketing of rice was faced with activities of middlemen (50%) and high taxes during transportation (19%). Profit efficiency were significantly determined by education, farming experience, amount of credit borrowed and extension contact. Therefore, it was recommended that government and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) should provide basic amenities such as good road network for the farmers to have access to the urban markets where they can sell their produce in order to improve the socio-economic status of the rice farmers especially in the study area.