Maize Output Supply Response to Climatic and other Input Variables in Ethiopia

Abstract

Climate change is among the major challenges to sustainable agricultural production in Ethiopia. Production of cereal crops, especially maize, is very responsive to changes in rainfall and temperature, as climatic parameters influencing productivity. This paper analyzes how climatic and other variables affect the supply of maize in Ethiopia. The data were obtained from secondary sources and cover the period 1981–2018. Data were analyzed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Schwarz Information Criterion (SIC), and Hannan-Quinn Information Criterion (HQ) were used to select the optimum number of lags. In order to detect whether unit root is present in the series, Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Philips-Perron (PP) tests were carried out. The presence of long-run equilibrium was found between maize output and temperature, rainfall, and other included variables. The results show that, in both the long and shortrun, all included climatic variables had a negative relationship with maize output supply, although temperature showed statistical insignificance (P>0.10). The result showed that maize crops are highly sensitive to extremes of rainfall – both shortage in the initial growing period and excessin the vegetative and fruiting stages. It was concluded that farmers face climate-related risk due to variations, particularly in rainfall. Therefore, farmers should adapt by using short-duration and climate-tolerant varieties of maize, along with engagement with eco-friendly production systems.