The Public-Private Partnership in Irrigation: What is the Impact on the Technical Efficiency of Citrus Farms in the Souss-Massa Region?

The Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a cooperative arrangement that allows the Government to entrust to a private company some public facilities or incorporeal investments from conception to management for a specific period. In the irrigation sector, this type of partnership appeared in 2005 and concerned the El Guerdane project in the Souss-Massa area. Since then, the Government has continued to implement other projects all over the country. However, the existing literature consulted allowed us to identify a significant deficit in the evaluation and the impact of such projects on farm performance as well as the use of water resources. The aim of this research is to evaluate the impact of two irrigation modes related to water service management on the technical performance of citrus farms, which are in our case the PPP mode adopted in the El Guerdane project and the conventional mode whose management is entrusted to a public institution. The selected sample includes 120 farms located in the two perimeters of El Guerdane and Issen. Apart from the fact that Issen perimeter is managed by the Regional Office for Agricultural Development of Souss-Mass, the two perimeters have similar pedo-climatic conditions of production mainly because of their proximity. In addition, the citrus growers in both areas adopt the same production technology. The farms in our sample were selected using the propensity score matching method, and the estimation of efficiency scores was performed using the parametric stochastic frontier approach to the production by the Frontier 4.1 software. The results revealed that technical efficiency scores range from 16% to 92% for all farms selected in our sample. The average technical efficiency is 68%. Basically, this result demonstrates that there is still room for increased production without additional input from factors of production including irrigation water. Furthermore, the determinants analysis shows that El Guerdane’s farms are relatively more technically efficient than Issen’s farms. Also, It has been found that membership of professional organizations contributes to the improvement of technical efficiency. In view of these results, it is recommended that the agricultural council structures intensify their support by targeting the least efficient farms. Keywords : Public-Private Partnership, Irrigation, Technical efficiency, El Guerdane project.