Because Saudi Arabia is a substantial importer of fish and its capture fishery is operating beyond maximum sustainable limits, it has a special interest in developing fish farming. It has been encouraging tilapia production. This study examines the costs of tilapia farming in the Central Region of Saudi Arabia using cross sectional data from 23 intensive fish farms. It provides information about the relative importance of different cost items such as variable costs and feed costs in total costs. Also, cost functions are estimated by ordinary least squares and a cubic cost function is found to provide the best fit to the available data. Minimum average cost of production occurs for 201 tonnes of tilapia per year per farm and profit is maximised for a production of 300 tonnes annually per farm. All farms operate at less than profit-maximising scale and most operate at less than minimum efficient scale. The reasons could be low quality fry, low levels of management expertise in culturing tilapia and the secondary nature of tilapia farming. Lack of water is likely to limit future expansion of tilapia farming in Saudi Arabia.

This paper aims to estimate efficiencies of input use and its determinants using a two step methodology. First, to estimate the efficiency of conventional and organic date farms in Saudi Arabia, with special reference to the Riyadh province. Second, to show the impacts of relative input use, as an indicator of technology level and specialization degree, as efficiency determinants. Riyadh Province has the main date production and date area, it reaches 23% and 25% of total production and area of dates respectively. It is also a province which is characterized by most of the organic date farms in the Kingdom.Technical, cost, and scale efficiencies are estimated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, for 82 conventional and 49 organic date farms. The study results show that 22% of conventional date farm technical efficiency have a range of 50-59%, while 32% of them have a cost efficiency range of 40-49%. Technical and cost efficiency ranges were 50-59% and 20-29% for 29% and 39% of organic date farms respectively.The efficiency measures are regressed, using Tobit Model, on a set of explanatory variables which includes efficiency determinants such as water, labor, per hectares. The significant relationship between farm use of water per hectare, as the most scarce resource, and scale efficiency is negative in the case of conventional and organic date farms, i.e. less water use increases scale efficiency. Date farm area relative to total farm area has a positive impact on date farm efficiency. A negative impact of labor, per hectare, on efficiency reflects the importance of applying modern agriculture which required less labor and more technology.

Saudi Arabia has dates as the most important agriculture crop, from both production and area harvested sides, its area was 155 thousand hectares and production was 991 thousand tons in 2010. Even that, the post production stage for dates did not developed to offer the efficient marketing services. Technical and cost efficiency estimation of date marketing became a necessary step to develop date marketing services. This study explores the relationship between, date marketing efficiencies, technical (TE) and cost (CE), and date marketing objectives, with special reference to date marketing scales (Y), date marketing margin (MM), and date marketing classical efficiency as ratio between date marketing margins to date marketing costs (MM/MC). Results of this case study indicated that technical efficiency, based on dates marketing scale objective, gets the highest value at Madena (0.80) while lowest was at Al-Hassa (0.68). While cost efficiency did not change much as it was 0.23 at Al-Hassa and 0.20 at the other 3 provinces. While for date marketing margin objective, the technical and cost efficiencies are the same, 0.7 and 0.2, respectively for all the studied four provinces. The ratio of market margin to marketing costs (MM/MC), as an objective, has its impact on technical efficiency for date marketing was about 0.7, for 3 provinces except at Riyadh, it was 0.6. The dates marketing cost efficiencies for all 4 provinces have the same value of 0.2.

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