Adapt, Adjust and Diversify: Rural Farm Households on-Farm and Off-Farm Behavioural Responses to Drought Shocks in Zambia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47672/aje.2847Keywords:
Drought Exposure, Crop Diversification, Cropland Adjustment, Fertilizer and Seed Uptake, Off-Farm Income, ZambiaAbstract
Purpose: To investigate whether access to agricultural support and the choice of adaptive strategy influence smallholder farmers' on-farm and off-farm behavioural responses to extreme drought exposure.
Materials and Methods: Using a large nationally representative rural household-level panel dataset, the study employs a matched Correlated Random Effects (CRE) tobit model to exploit regional variations in drought exposure conditions.
Findings: Relative to the counterfactual group, the results show that beneficiaries of fertilizer-seed support and agricultural credit respond to severe drought stresses by improving crop portfolio management strategies. Further, the results also reveal that recipients of fertilizer-seed support expand croplands, seed consumption, and fertilizer utilization in response to extreme drought conditions while access to agricultural credit contributes to higher off-farm incomes and hence promotes occupational diversity in treatment farm households. Collectively, this points to the instrumental role of agricultural support in influencing the margin of adjustment in a way that strengthens the adaptive capacity of poor treatment farm households to climatic variability and change. However, for the large part, the choice of adaptive strategy appears to induce the opposite effects, with drought exposed adopters not only shifting towards more specialized cropping systems but also reducing hectarage shares, agricultural inputs, and off-farm incomes. Together, this is an indication that treatment adopters are relatively more vulnerable to future extreme moisture stress conditions, mainly cultivate improved localized staple crops, fortify agricultural investments on smaller manageable croplands, reallocate labour away from off-farm income enterprises towards own-farm activities, and are unlikely to increase seed and fertilizer uptake alongside adaptive land investments that are not suitable to localized weather conditions. The estimated results are robust to alternative estimation strategies, sample size adjustments, and alternate dataset.
Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Based on the results of this study, agricultural policy should be localized and targeted to be effective. Support programs, particularly fertilizer-seed support, credit access, and extension services, must be designed to reflect regional agroclimatic conditions to strengthen farmers’ resilience. Specifically, policies should prioritize providing accessible finance and technical guidance to encourage climate-smart agricultural investments that are suitable to local weather patterns. By doing so, policymakers can help smallholders adopt adaptive behaviours that reduce vulnerability and enhance long-term climate resilience.
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