Abstract
The study examined the effect of climate change on agricultural crop returns in Uganda using the Ricardian Panel Tobit technique and the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) data, climate data from Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA) and global weather data. The findings showed that climate related risks account for over 67 percent of agricultural risks and less than 2 percent of the farming households practise irrigation. Farmers that practised irrigation earned higher agricultural returns nationally than their counterparts did. The findings show that the output elasticities with respect to temperature range from -2.02 percent to 0.543 percent. This implies that for the average temperature increase by 1 percent, maize farm returns decreased by 2.02 percent, banana by 1.7 percent, cassava by 1.50 percent and beans by 1.01 percent. While 1 percent increases in rainfall, lowered banana returns by 0.02 percent, beans by 0.08 percent, cassava by 0.035 percent, maize by 0.025 percent except for groundnuts’ returns increased by 0.115 percent. Apart from climate factors, non-climate factors such as capital, labour, farm size, fertilizers and soil quality are equally important inputs and significantly impact on agricultural farm returns. The study proposes that due to unrelenting adverse climate change effects in Uganda, adoption of multi-pronged approaches such as extensive irrigation, agro-insurance, diversification of agricultural activities, use of food cribs during bumper harvests would be the breath of life for Ugandan farmers.
Highlights
Global climate has warmed since 1950s and anthropogenic influence is the most likely dominant cause (IPCC, 2014; Angélil et al, 2017)
Agricultural farm returns are expressed in dollars with threshold value appearing as zero for various periods farmers harvested and this demotivates farmers from undertaking agricultural activities that are largely prone to losses
The main reason why most agricultural households experience large amounts of pre-harvest losses is due to overdependence on rain-fed agriculture as shown in Table 3, which shows water sources for agricultural production
Summary
Global climate has warmed since 1950s and anthropogenic influence is the most likely dominant cause (IPCC, 2014; Angélil et al, 2017). The undulating climate change has affected water resources, food and agricultural systems globally (Hanjra & Qureshi, 2010; Nielsen & Vigh, 2012; Teixeira et al, 2013). In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where the majority of the population depends on climatesensitive agriculture (World Bank, 2010), the frequency of meteorological disasters have caused both prevalent economic and life losses in the region (Gasper et al, 2011; Thurlow et al, 2012) and derailed poverty alleviation efforts (Dell et al, 2009; Skoufias, 2012). The preceding impacts are likely to have unequal distribution globally, with developing countries at disadvantage, given their geographical position, limited resources, and low adaptive capacities (Peña-López, 2009)
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