Rice production in Africa is characterized by small-scale farming systems facing problems of technical efficiency due to the use of sub-optimal input combinations, climatic conditions and also variation in socio-economic characteristics. Furthermore bird chasing efforts to prevent enormous yield losses are becoming a huge burden amongst farmers although the real impacts are not well reported. This study utilizes a stochastic frontier approach to estimate the technical efficiency and its

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... ants amongst small scale rice producers in Cameroon. The Cobb-Douglas production function fits a combined 2007 and 2008 pooled data of small-scale rice producers drawn from the rice-growing basins across the country. The separation of the labor input variable shows the effect of bird chasing labor to rice production in our study area, with farmers' spending about 40% of their total labor hours in bird chasing. From our sample, the small-scale rice producers showed an estimated 78 percent technical efficiency score thus suggesting there is still great room for improving farmers' efficiency through the optimal use of currently available resources. Our study emphasizes that land expansion and improving the availability of seed will increase farmers' output. Besides farmer's gender, irrigation and lowland farming system, are factors which significantly impact the technical efficiency of farmers' rice production.