Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to review the paper An analysis of the eco-efficiency of the agricultural industry in the Brazilian Amazon biome.  The paper deals with an exciting problem.

·        The paper is well written.

·        Methodology is well applied. Inputs and outputs in the DEA model are well-defined.

·        Results are reliable.

·        The paper is written in a scientific manner.

Suggestions are below:

·        Avoid numbering in Abstract.

·        It is necessary to understand the purpose and aim of the paper as well as its "position" in relation to previous research (also gap analysis).

·        The last paragraph in the Introduction section should be a short structure of the paper.

·        Practical and Theoretical implications are missing

·        The results should be compared with previous in the literature.

·        Scientific contributions should be clearly emphasized in the last section.

 

Li, W. Q., Han, X. X., Lin, Z. B., & Rahman, A. (2024). Enhanced Pest and Disease Detection in Agriculture Using Deep Learning-Enabled Drones. Acadlore Trans. Mach. Learn., 3(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.56578/ataiml030101

Shang, M., Pei, Y. F., Chen, C. C., Shin, Y., & Zhu, M. Q. (2023). Assessing Manufacturing Efficiency in Central Plains Cities: A Three-Stage DEA and Malmquist Index Approach. J. Urban Dev. Manag., 2(4), 196-210. https://doi.org/10.56578/judm020403

 

 

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to review the paper An analysis of the eco-efficiency of the agricultural industry in the Brazilian Amazon biome.  The paper deals with an exciting problem.

• The paper is well written.
• Methodology is well applied. Inputs and outputs in the DEA model are well-defined.
• Results are reliable.
• The paper is written in a scientific manner.

 1) Avoid numbering in Abstract.

We deeply appreciate your comments. We have removed the numbering in the abstract, as accurately requested (lines 11 a 16).

2) It is necessary to understand the purpose and aim of the paper as well as its "position" in relation to previous research (also gap analysis).

We express our gratitude for the review made by the reviewer. We wrote the paragraph that describes the objectives of our article, covering the purpose of the research (line 130 to 139). Furthermore, we wrote a paragraph describing the gap that our study aims to fill in the literature and the importance of our study for the sustainable development of agriculture in Brazil (lines 140 to 151).

3) The last paragraph in the Introduction section should be a short structure of the paper.

We gratefully acknowledge your review. A new paragraph has been added to the end of the Introduction, presenting the structure of the work (lines 152 to 159).

4) Practical and Theoretical implications are missing.

We express our gratitude for the review. To inform readers of the theoretical and practical contributions that our study brought, we created two paragraphs in subsection 4.8 “Implications”, the first considering the theoretical contributions (lines 707 to 719) and the second considering the practical contributions (lines 720 to 727 ), concisely explaining these points to readers.

5) The results should be compared with previous in the literature.

We gratefully acknowledge the review carried out by the reviewer. To meet the suggestion of our esteemed reviewer, comparisons of our results found in relation to the results found by previous studies present in the literature were added to the end of some paragraphs in section 4 “Results and discussions”. In subsection 4.2 a paragraph was added (lines 484 to 488); in subsection 4.3 a paragraph was added discussing the result of the return to scale test (lines 502 to 505); in subsection 4.4 two paragraphs were added (lines 550 to 568).

6) Scientific contributions should be clearly emphasized in the last section.

We appreciate the review conducted by the reviewer. The contributions were written and highlighted in the last section, before the conclusion, section 4 “Results and discussions”, together with the theoretical and practical implications of our study, as mentioned in item 4 (lines 709 to 727).

7) Li, W. Q., Han, X. X., Lin, Z. B., & Rahman, A. (2024). Enhanced Pest and Disease Detection in Agriculture Using Deep Learning-Enabled Drones. Acadlore Trans. Mach. Learn., 3(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.56578/ataiml030101.

Shang, M., Pei, Y. F., Chen, C. C., Shin, Y., & Zhu, M. Q. (2023). Assessing Manufacturing Efficiency in Central Plains Cities: A Three-Stage DEA and Malmquist Index Approach. J. Urban Dev. Manag., 2(4), 196-210. https://doi.org/10.56578/judm020403.

We thank the reviewer for suggesting references in the review. The references mentioned [31,29] were considered relevant to enriching our study, so they were added in section 1, “Introduction” (lines 141 and 143) and section 4, “Results and discussions” (line 712).

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title:  An analysis of the eco-efficiency of the agricultural industry in the Brazilian Amazon biome

 

My comments

 Title: Ok

 Abstract: ok.

 Keywords:  Agricultural Industry; Amazon; Bootstrap; Eco-efficiency; DEA

 The search for scientific articles is done by words in the title and abstract. So I don't think that it is correct to repeats in the keywords the same words that are in that title and Abstract.

I suggest that the authors include only words or terms that do not appear in the title or Abstract. Please delete: Agricultural Industry; Amazon; eco-efficiency.

Check all keywords in abstract and title.

Also, don't use abbreviations in keywords.

 

INTRODUCTION

The introduction section is generally well written.

My doubts are at the end of the introduction section.

 

The objectives of the paper should be rewritten.

Firstly, at the end of the Introduction section, the authors say: “that this research aims to contribute to these issues by showing the possibility of producing efficiently with less environmental impact and less use of resources in agriculture in the municipalities that compose the Brazilian Amazon biome”.

Then, the authors say: "The estimates then define useful indicators for formulating and evaluating sustainability policies, such as parameters for rewarding generators of positive environmental externalities."

Finally, the authors say, "Another purpose is to identify the correlation between weather and agricultural production efficiency."

 

I think this list of intentions or objectives (above) has no correlation with the background that the authors mention in the Introduction section. Authors should put a real limit on the objectives of the article by being modest when defining them.

After carefully reading the article, I consider that the indicated objectives were not achieved.

Does the introduction end at line 129?.

 

Materials and Methods
The Materials and Methods section: Where is it?.

My doubts:
Paragraphs between lines 130 and 446: Are these paragraphs part of the Materials and Methods section?

This whole thing is very confusing.

The article does not have a logical structure.

For example:

Between lines 430 to 434, the authors say: These contradictory results come from the definition of protected area variable in the Censuses, as it represents the protected area in the farms, not including Indigenous reservation areas, (environment) Conservation Units, and other public areas (with no private owners).

 

This paragraph (above) corresponds to the Results and Discussion section.

Where is the Results and Discussion section?

I don't understand why the authors do it this way. Authors should note that in the Sustainability web site in the “instructions for authors” item says:

Sustainability now accepts free format submission:

Free Format Submission

Sustainability now accepts free format submission:

We do not have strict formatting requirements, but all manuscripts must contain the required sections: Author Information, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results, Conclusions, Figures and Tables with Captions, Funding Information, Author Contributions, Conflict of Interest and other Ethics Statements. Check the Journal Instructions for Authors for more details.

This article only has the Introduction, Results, and the Conclusions sections. I think it is necessary to restructure the article before publishing it.

 

RESULTS

Results must be improved

All the results remain poor. Some paragraphs are more of a review than a discussion of the few results presented and the methods used.

 

For example:

Between lines 448 to 455: Using the final base of 516 DMUs, after removing the outliers and super efficiencies, the bootstrap statistical testing method was used to define whether the model should be CRS or VRS. For this test, the null hypothesis is that the model should be CRS, constant returns to scale, and it should only be rejected if the value of the calculated S statistic is less than the estimated critical value, which is also defined within the bootstrap tests. In the test, 10,000 simulations are carried out, resulting in a critical value of Cα = 0.3854. Since the estimated value for comparing the DEA models was 0.9605, it was higher than the critical value Cα.

In this paragraph (above), the authors explain the method used. It is not a result.

 

The Results and Discussion section should be added in a corrected version of the manuscript. Some authors cited in the introduction section should be discussed in this section.

 

Conclusions:

The conclusions are weak due to the low novelty value. The conclusions are not well presented

Conclusions should give answers to the study objectives not list the results or explain what was done in this work..

The conclusions must be rewritten

 

Between lines: 613 to 625: The main objective of this study was to measure how advanced current eco-efficiency is in the municipalities of the Brazilian Amazon biome regarding agricultural activities, the most critical sector of the economy in the region, and on the national stage. It aims to provide a structured view of how much it is possible to maximize the region’s economic development without disregarding the environmental impacts these activities can cause from 2006 to 2017, with a view to the 2030 agenda. To this end, we mapped the municipalities that should improve their efficiency. We began an analysis of how these municipalities could improve their eco-efficiency, stimulating improvements towards ecological sustainability, using the data cloud method to eliminate outliers with the potential to bias the results using bootstrap computational techniques, applying the scale return test to analyze the significance and measurement of the scores corrected for random data bias. This allows us to test the differences between the eco-efficiencies of the municipalities in the defined period from 2006 to 2017.

Please, this paragraph must be deleted. This paragraph (above) is not conclusions. The conclusions do not explain what was done in this work.

 

Between lines: 632 to 634: In addition, for the municipalities that have not yet reached the eco-efficient frontier, there is a potential for improving agricultural revenue by approximately R$ 3.195 million and decreasing 25,849,560 thousand tons of CO2 emissions

Please, this paragraph must be deleted. This paragraph (above) is not conclusions. This paragraph is repetition of results (please, see table 4).

The paragraphs between lines 651 and 680 could be part of the new results and discussion section.

For example, in these paragraphs, the authors compared and discussed their results with those of other authors (see [18] and [40]).

I hope that the authors take into account these comments.

 

Finally, in my humble opinion the conclusions could be these:

The results point to an essential interpretation that most of the municipalities are already operating at a satisfactory level of efficiency given the technological level available; around 7.17% of the municipalities would already be workingon an eco-efficient scale.

The production frontier of the municipalities results in a technological behavior of constant returns to scale (CRS), which is a relevant result for understanding factors that involve inequality between producers in the municipalities because, given the results of the model, both small, medium and large producers can be eco-efficient (total efficiency) given the CRS frontier within the Amazon Biome. Hence, these differences occur regardless of the production level, so there will be inefficient and efficient small, medium, and large producers.

We also recommend redoing the DEA modeling with different groups of municipalities, separating them by state or region rather than comparing all the municipalities with each other. In addition, comparing the results with other areas of the country and even other countries makes sense. Adding input or output variables to the survey would also enrich the analysis. This would allow a larger volume of data and situations to be tested.

 

References

24 articles cited, out of a total of 40, are more than 15 years old. The results should be compared with the articles published last 5 years (This will benefit the discussion chapter).

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

1)   Title: Ok

 Abstract: ok.

 Keywords:  Agricultural Industry; Amazon; Bootstrap; Eco-efficiency; DEA

The search for scientific articles is done by words in the title and abstract. So I don't think that it is correct to repeats in the keywords the same words that are in that title and Abstract.

I suggest that the authors include only words or terms that do not appear in the title or Abstract. Please delete: Agricultural Industry; Amazon; eco-efficiency.

Check all keywords in abstract and title.

Also, don't use abbreviations in keywords.

We formally thank you for the reviewer's meticulous review. As pointed out by our esteemed reviewer (lines 20 to 21), we changed the keywords in our article to synonyms so that they would not lose their meaning and be considered during the search for scientific articles. Therefore, the keywords chosen were the following: Farming Industry, ecosystem, bootstrap, sustainable development, and Productivity Analysis.

2) INTRODUCTION

The introduction section is generally well written.

My doubts are at the end of the introduction section.

The objectives of the paper should be rewritten.

Firstly, at the end of the Introduction section, the authors say: “that this research aims to contribute to these issues by showing the possibility of producing efficiently with less environmental impact and less use of resources in agriculture in the municipalities that compose the Brazilian Amazon biome”.

Then, the authors say: "The estimates then define useful indicators for formulating and evaluating sustainability policies, such as parameters for rewarding generators of positive environmental externalities."

Finally, the authors say, "Another purpose is to identify the correlation between weather and agricultural production efficiency."

I think this list of intentions or objectives (above) has no correlation with the background that the authors mention in the Introduction section. Authors should put a real limit on the objectives of the article by being modest when defining them.

After carefully reading the article, I consider that the indicated objectives were not achieved.

Does the introduction end at line 129?.

We are extremely grateful to the reviewer for the detailed review. We removed the last paragraph from the old section 1 “Introduction” (line 118 to 129). Furthermore, we rewrote the objectives in a more concise way (lines 130 to 139) according to the context presented by the introduction and what is achieved during the discussions of the article's results.

3) Materials and Methods

The Materials and Methods section: Where is it?.

My doubts:

Paragraphs between lines 130 and 446: Are these paragraphs part of the Materials and Methods section?

This whole thing is very confusing.

The article does not have a logical structure.

For example:

Between lines 430 to 434, the authors say: These contradictory results come from the definition of protected area variable in the Censuses, as it represents the protected area in the farms, not including Indigenous reservation areas, (environment) Conservation Units, and other public areas (with no private owners).

This paragraph (above) corresponds to the Results and Discussion section.

Where is the Results and Discussion section?

I don't understand why the authors do it this way. Authors should note that in the Sustainability web site in the “instructions for authors” item says:

Sustainability now accepts free format submission:

Free Format Submission

Sustainability now accepts free format submission:

We do not have strict formatting requirements, but all manuscripts must contain the required sections: Author Information, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Theoretical framework, Materials & Methods, Results, Conclusions, Figures and Tables with Captions, Funding Information, Author Contributions, Conflict of Interest and other Ethics Statements. Check the Journal Instructions for Authors for more details.

This article only has the Introduction, Results, and the Conclusions sections. I think it is necessary to restructure the article before publishing it.

We express our gratitude for the review meticulously conducted by the reviewer. We recognize that the structure as it was is presented in a confusing way to readers. Therefore, changes were made to the body in several parts of the text to reorganize the sections into Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Theoretical Framework, Materials & Methods, Results and Discussions, and Conclusions. The former sections 3 “Stochastic DEA model - Confidence intervals' bootstrap” and 4 “Methodology of eco-efficiency” were reorganized as subsections of the current section 3 “Materials and Methods” (lines 258, 276, 305, 327, 396), it was removing some parts of the text that, when relocated to a new location, would become repetitive, so it was decided to exclude some paragraphs to create a logical structure to the article (lines 357 to 395). Section 4 “Results” was reorganized in order to correspond with the same structure of the research execution, thus following the same order presented in the previous section of “Materials and Methods” to have a logical structure for readers (lines 426, 454, 489, 513, 569, 586, 678, 707). Thus, the article is structured by Section 1 containing the Introduction, section 2 with the Theoretical framework, section 3 with Materials and Methods, section 4 with Results and discussions, and the last section 5 containing the article's Conclusion. This way the article will be better prepared to be appreciated by our readers.

4) RESULTS

Results must be improved

All the results remain poor. Some paragraphs are more of a review than a discussion of the few results presented and the methods used.

For example:

Between lines 448 to 455: Using the final base of 516 DMUs, after removing the outliers and super efficiencies, the bootstrap statistical testing method was used to define whether the model should be CRS or VRS. For this test, the null hypothesis is that the model should be CRS, constant returns to scale, and it should only be rejected if the value of the calculated S statistic is less than the estimated critical value, which is also defined within the bootstrap tests. In the test, 10,000 simulations are carried out, resulting in a critical value of Cα = 0.3854. Since the estimated value for comparing the DEA models was 0.9605, it was higher than the critical value Cα.

In this paragraph (above), the authors explain the method used. It is not a result.

The Results and Discussion section should be added in a corrected version of the manuscript. Some authors cited in the introduction section should be discussed in this section.

We gratefully acknowledge the review carried out by the reviewer. Section 4 “Results and discussion” was added as requested by the reviewer (line 425). The paragraph referring to old lines 448 and 455 pointed out by the reviewer was removed (lines 490 to 495), the paragraph was rewritten to contain only the results presented by the test, and all methodological explanations were removed (lines 495 to 501). Furthermore, comparisons with other articles were added to the end of some paragraphs in section 4 “Results and discussions”. In subsection 4.2, a paragraph was added (lines 484 to 488); in subsection 4.3 a paragraph was added discussing the result of the return to scale test (lines 502 to 505); in subsection 4.4 two paragraphs were added (lines 550 to 568).

5) CONCLUSIONS:

The conclusions are weak due to the low novelty value. The conclusions are not well presented

Conclusions should give answers to the study objectives not list the results or explain what was done in this work..

The conclusions must be rewritten

Between lines: 613 to 625: The main objective of this study was to measure how advanced current eco-efficiency is in the municipalities of the Brazilian Amazon biome regarding agricultural activities, the most critical sector of the economy in the region, and on the national stage. It aims to provide a structured view of how much it is possible to maximize the region’s economic development without disregarding the environmental impacts these activities can cause from 2006 to 2017, with a view to the 2030 agenda. To this end, we mapped the municipalities that should improve their efficiency. We began an analysis of how these municipalities could improve their eco-efficiency, stimulating improvements towards ecological sustainability, using the data cloud method to eliminate outliers with the potential to bias the results using bootstrap computational techniques, applying the scale return test to analyze the significance and measurement of the scores corrected for random data bias. This allows us to test the differences between the eco-efficiencies of the municipalities in the defined period from 2006 to 2017.

Please, this paragraph must be deleted. This paragraph (above) is not conclusions. The conclusions do not explain what was done in this work.

Between lines: 632 to 634: In addition, for the municipalities that have not yet reached the eco-efficient frontier, there is a potential for improving agricultural revenue by approximately R$ 3.195 million and decreasing 25,849,560 thousand tons of CO2 emissions

Please, this paragraph must be deleted. This paragraph (above) is not conclusions. This paragraph is repetition of results (please, see table 4).

We greatly appreciate the reviewer's suggestion. We rewrote the entire conclusion, leaving only the parts that were suggested by all reviewers. The conclusion presented the response to the main objective of the article and suggestions for future work (lines 742 to 744, 761 to 767, 800 to 804). As requested by the reviewer, the first paragraph, the old lines 613 to 625 of section 5 “Conclusion” (lines 729 to 741), was removed. Furthermore, the paragraph pointed out by the reviewer, old lines 632 to 634, was removed from section 5 “conclusions” (lines 751 to 753).

8)  CONCLUSIONS:

The paragraphs between lines 651 and 680 could be part of the new results and discussion section.

For example, in these paragraphs, the authors compared and discussed their results with those of other authors (see [18] and [40]).

I hope that the authors take into account these comments.

The paragraphs pointed out by the reviewer, old lines 651 to 680, were removed from section 5 “Conclusions” (lines 770 to 796) and rewritten in section 4 “Results and discussions” (lines 679 to 706), which contains the references cited by the reviewer, old [18,40] and current [18,50] (lines 693 and 702).

9)  CONCLUSIONS:

Finally, in my humble opinion the conclusions could be these:

The results point to an essential interpretation that most of the municipalities are already operating at a satisfactory level of efficiency given the technological level available; around 7.17% of the municipalities would already be workingon an eco-efficient scale.

The production frontier of the municipalities results in a technological behavior of constant returns to scale (CRS), which is a relevant result for understanding factors that involve inequality between producers in the municipalities because, given the results of the model, both small, medium and large producers can be eco-efficient (total efficiency) given the CRS frontier within the Amazon Biome. Hence, these differences occur regardless of the production level, so there will be inefficient and efficient small, medium, and large producers.

We also recommend redoing the DEA modeling with different groups of municipalities, separating them by state or region rather than comparing all the municipalities with each other. In addition, comparing the results with other areas of the country and even other countries makes sense. Adding input or output variables to the survey would also enrich the analysis. This would allow a larger volume of data and situations to be tested.

We express our gratitude for the meticulous review conducted by the reviewer. We removed all paragraphs from the old version of section 5 “Conclusion” and followed the suggestion of our esteemed reviewer (lines 742 to 744, 761 to 767, 800 to 804). We hope that the reviewer will appreciate our change.

10) REFERENCES:

24 articles cited, out of a total of 40, are more than 15 years old. The results should be compared with the articles published last 5 years (This will benefit the discussion chapter).

We greatly appreciate the reviewer's suggestion. 8 references were added to the body of the text that are less than 5 years old (2022 to 2024), making the article's references more recent to the article. Comparisons were made of our results with the results of previous studies, mainly with reference [33] as it is the most similar article, adding paragraphs in section 4 “Results”: In subsection 4.2 a paragraph was added discussing the detection results of outliers with other studies (lines 484 to 488); in subsection 4.3 a paragraph was added discussing the result of the return to scale test being CRS (lines 502 to 505); in subsection 4.4, two paragraphs were added comparing municipalities considered eco-efficient and inefficient (lines 550 to 568); in subsection 4.5 there is no other study that uses the malquimst index in the Amazon Biome considering the efficiencies calculated by bootstrap, so no comparison was made, just presenting the results.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper should be accepted for publication. Congratulations!

Comments on the Quality of English Language

.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 This manuscript shows a substantial improvement. Therefore, it fits perfectly well within the scope of the journal.

Authors took all my comments into account and performed several changes in the text representing a clear improvement from the previous version.

Therefore, I have no more to add.

Best regards.