The findings of the study rejected the hypothesis that contract farming is an effective tool to increase farmer‟s income. Moreover, the frontier empirical analysis reveals that some input variables have positive impacts on the output of tea production. Finally, the stochastic frontier indicates that there is no statistically significant different in terms of technical coefficients for both contract and non-contract farmers. | Nguyễn Thị Bích Ngọc và Đtg Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 119(05): 143 - 149 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NON-CONTRACT AND CONTRACT FARMERS IN TEA SECTOR IN VIETNAM: THE CASE STUDY IN THAI NGUYEN AND PHU THO PROVINCES Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc*, Ho Van Bac, Nguyen Thuong Huyen College of Agriculture and Forestry - TNU SUMMARY Contract farming is seen as the way of linking agribussiness and farmers by delivering, market information and risk sharing to smallholders. This study was conducted to examine the roles of contract farming in tea sector in Thai Nguyen and Phu Tho provinces which are two of the largest tea producers of Vietnam regarding both production and farming area. The data used in this study was based on the survey of 47 tea farmers and 5 processing firms in 2013. The frontier model is applied to investigate whether contract farms more technically efficient than non-contract farms. The findings of the study rejected the hypothesis that contract farming is an effective tool to increase farmer‟s income. Moreover, the frontier empirical analysis reveals that some input variables have positive impacts on the output of tea production. Finally, the stochastic frontier indicates that there is no statistically significant different in terms of technical coefficients for both contract and non-contract farmers. Keywords: Contract farming, Cobb-Douglas production function, efficiency, non-contract farming, tea sector, Vietnam INTRODUCTION* The role of contract farming in developing countries has been a controversial issues since the 1970s (Glove 1984; Minot 1984) [5,10]. The recent studies provide various evidences to support the advantages, though contract farming system, to small farmers in developing countries (Glover and Kusterer 1990; Simmons 2002; Nguyen et al. 2005; Myata et [6,16,13,11]. For example, Glover et al. (1990) [6] stated that contracting is fundamentally way of sharing risk between firms and growers; Whereas Patrick (2004) [14] considered .
