Speaker
Description
Smallholder Welfare and Weather Extremes: Assessing the Effects of Climate Change Adaptation Measures
Keywords: Climate change adaptation, household resilience, sustainable cocoa, agricultural practices
Introduction and Research Objective
Climate change is a major threat to food production systems (Wheeler and Braun 2013). Frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts and high temperatures contribute to increased crop stress, while gradual temperature increases create favourable conditions for disease and pest outbreaks (Skendžić et al. 2021), both of which reduce crop productivity. At the same time, the majority of smallholder farmers in many developing countries depend on rain-fed crop production for their livelihoods, making them particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change (Cohn et al. 2017).
Against this background, there is an urgent need to identify strategies on how smallholder farmers can adapt to climate change and thereby increase their resilience to extreme weather events. The existing literature on smallholder climate change adaptation often relies on cross-sectional data, neglecting to account for the long-term effects of changing rainfall and temperature patterns (e.g. Amadu et al. 2020). Moreover, the majority of research has focused on seasonal crops like maize, millet or rice (e.g. Arslan et al. 2017) and the effects of agricultural practice related to climate change adaptation on perennial crops under differing climatic conditions are still poorly understood.
Here, we use panel data from smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana to examine the effects of widely promoted agricultural practices related to climate change adaptation on agricultural and welfare outcomes. Further, we estimate how these effects differ under changing weather extremes. Specifically, we examine the effects of inter-cropping, synthetic fertilizer use, practices of integrated pest and weed management and the use of hybrid cocoa varieties on cocoa yield, cocoa and agricultural income and household dietary diversity.
Although Ghana is the world's second largest cocoa producer, its cocoa yields per hectare remain among the lowest in the world (FAO 2023). Reasons for low productivity are related to lack of knowledge on agricultural technologies and practices, lack of agrochemical inputs, ageing cocoa trees, depleted soils, and high pest and disease pressure (Bymolt et al. 2018). In addition, Ghana is at high risk of drought due to climate change, with projections indicating a further decline in climatic suitability for cocoa. This will have severe implications not only for Ghana’s economy which heavily relies on cocoa production but also for the livelihoods of millions of smallholder cocoa farmers (Ruf et al. 2015).
Methods
Data
We use two waves of household data collected in 2019 and 2022. To obtain our household data, we applied a multi-stage sampling strategy where we randomly selected 45 communities from five regions based on existing population census data. Our sample is based on a balanced dataset of 365 cocoa farming households. We use rainfall data from Chirps and temperature data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.
Anticipated Estimation Strategy
We will use a fixed-effects estimation approach to study the effects on our outcome variables. Furthermore, we will interact the agricultural practice variables with climate variables to estimate to which extent the effects differ in the presence of weather extremes.
Expected Results
We expect to find that synthetic fertilizer has a positive effect on cocoa, yet we anticipate that this effect may reduce during droughts due to potential limitations in nutrient absorption by cocoa tree roots. Furthermore, we expect inter-cropping to contribute significantly to additional agricultural income and enhance household dietary diversity. This positive effect is expected to intensify during extreme weather events, providing a compensatory source of income and nutrition when cocoa yields are adversely impacted. Regarding the utilization of hybrid crop varieties, we posit that their influence on overall cocoa yields may not be pronounced under normal weather conditions. However, we anticipate a positive turn in this effect during weather extremes, when traditional cocoa varieties struggle to survive. Lastly, we anticipate that integrated pest and weed management practices will positively affect cocoa yields, and that this positive effect persists even under weather extremes.
Expected Conclusion
We anticipate that the findings of our study will identify which agricultural practices related to climate change adaptation will improve agricultural and welfare outcomes and how these effects change under diverse weather extremes. From a policy perspective, our study will put emphasis on promoting practices which have proven to be most effective in mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change.
