Analysis of citrus production efficiency and inter-provincial variability in China under the constraints of non-point source pollution

Globally, China is one of the primary citrus producers. This study provided a theoretical reference for sustainable production in the citrus industry in China by measuring citrus production efficiency under non-point source pollution and analyzing inter-provincial variability. In this study, non-radio logical and non-angled data envelopment analysis models were used in seven provinces during 2006-2018 based on non-desired outputs. The temporal and spatial characteristics were analyzed to determine the factors that cause efficiency losses. Results indicated that the citrus production efficiency had a general w-type trend with high inter-provincial variability, where the highest and lowest production efficiencies occurred in Hubei Province and Guangdong Province, respectively. In the past four years, a redundancy in labor and fertilizer inputs was also observed in Guangdong and Fujian, respectively. The shrinkable proportion of each factor input in the seven provinces was zero. An increase in citrus yield per hectare was recorded, in which the highest was in Guangdong. In each province, high emissions of total nitrogen and phosphorus generally caused the decrease in citrus production efficiency.