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Due to rapid urbanization, rice consumption in Togo has also rapidly increased. Most consumers prefer imported rice over domestically produced rice due to the higher quality of the imported rice. The purpose of this paper is to show that it is possible to upgrade the quality of Togo’s domestically produced rice by providing technical and management support in the form of contract farming.

Cross-sectional data were collected using a multi-stage sampling technique. An endogenous switching regression model was used for data analysis.

The results show that by participating in contract farming, paddy rice quality was upgraded from Grade IV (poor quality) to Grade I (premium quality). The factors influencing this upgrade in the quality of paddy rice grown through contract farming are: the number of extension visits to the farmer, the mode of threshing used by the farmer, and the agro-ecological zone of the farmer.

The data for this study are limited to one country, Togo and this may have implications for generalizing the results for other countries.

This study is original research that contributes to an improved understanding of the impacts of contract farming on the quality of agricultural products produced in developing and emerging economies.

A major topical issue in the 21st century is climate change, and its impact on humanity cannot be quantified, as it affects agriculture, water levels, settlements and more. This study aims to evaluate the effect of climate change on farm technical efficiency in rural Cameroon and suggest ways for improvement.

We employ a two-step approach to assess whether the efficiency of these farms is vulnerable to climate change. In the first step, we calculate efficiency using the stochastic frontier approach with a Cobb–Douglas specification. In the second step, we investigate the effect of climate change on efficiency by applying a Tobit model. The data used come from a questionnaire survey of 419 randomly selected farmers.

The findings reveal that the average level of technical efficiency is 62.9%. This implies that there are existing opportunities to increase technical efficiency if resources are used optimally. The results also show that increases in the climate change vulnerability index have statistically significant negative effects on the technical efficiency of farms. This negative relationship is attributable to the adverse influence of the exposure and sensitivity components of the climate change vulnerability index.

We provide an understanding of the effect of climate change vulnerability on the technical efficiency of farms in rural Cameroon and suggest means of improving it. Additionally, we examine whether the influence of climate change varies across agro-ecological zones.