The objective of this article is to determine the efficiency of the poultry farm in Bangladesh and to assess the influence of contract farming system, using a data envelopment analysis. Seventy-five commercial poultry farms (25 and 50 independent and contract farms, respectively) were randomly selected. The results reveal that efficiency scores vary across sample farms. To explain some of these variations, the efficiency scores were regressed on some human capital variables and farming system using a Tobit model. The study also estimates elasticities to provide the information on the magnitude of the influence of variables on Technical Efficiency (TE), Allocative Efficiency (AE) and Economic Efficiency (EE). The results show that the contracting system is positively and significantly related to the farm's TE, AE and EE. This is expected because under contractual agreement, in order to obtain sufficient supplies of the right quality of poultry meat at the right time, the company provides technical know how assistance through company's recruited supervisor, production inputs and services, and production credit along with intensive supervision, which in turn improves farm efficiency. Thus, by receiving technical know how contract farmers have gained more knowledge on their resource and practices, which enables them to use resources more efficiently. Empirical results can provide crucial information to policy makers that improve poultry farm efficiency.

Recognizing that community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) approaches have had mixed success in pastoral rangelands, this paper compares five case studies—two from Kenya, two from Ethiopia and one from Tunisia—to identify aspects of social-ecological context that affect the implementation and success of CBNRM in pastoral settings. Data for each case was collected following a common protocol. Among the characteristics that emerged from our study as important were socio-political and biophysical characteristics of the wider landscape within which the community’s rangeland territory is located and the extent to which that territory is circumscribed by some combination of other land uses and land tenure types, major political boundaries, and physical landscape features. The analysis of these cases suggests that where pastoralist communities coexist in large, open rangeland landscapes, rather than a narrowly community-based approach, natural resource management interventions need to be explicitly multi-level and horizontally flexible.