Resilience Strategies to Agricultural Shocks and their Effects on Family Farms in Rural Areas in Senegal
Marie Ndeye Gnilane Diouf, André Dumas Tsambou, Nelson Sergeo Tagang Tene
Family farming is an important source of income for rural populations in Senegal. But, because of the effects of agricultural shocks coupled with the vagaries of climate change, farmers are often unable to increase their production, let alone their income. Faced with these shocks and hazards, farmers feel compelled to adopt adaptation, resistance and prevention strategies for potential future shocks. The objective of this research is to analyze the resilience strategies of family farms in rural Senegal in response to agricultural shocks, and to assess the effect of these resilience strategies on the productivity of farms and the income of farmers. To do this, we focus on three specific objectives. First, we identify common resilience strategies to agricultural shocks among family farms in rural Senegal based on a descriptive analysis of the 2018/2019 Senegal Annual Agricultural Survey. Then, we identify the main factors that limit or promote the adoption of resilience strategies by farms using a multinomial Probit model. Finally, we assess the impact of resilience strategies on the productivity of family farms and on the income of rural farmers using endogenous switching regression. We focus on three practices, the construction of dikes, crop rotation and the use of certified seeds as resilience strategies for farms in rural areas in the face of agricultural and climatic shocks. The multivariate analysis shows that the adoption of resilience strategies of family farms is strongly linked to climatic variables (humidity, temperature, precipitation), the level of education of the owner of the farm, the size of the agricultural household and the agroecological zone. The impact evaluation shows that these resilience strategies have a significantly positive impact on the productivity of family farms in rural areas. The results of this study are largely consistent with those of many other studies in other countries (Di Falco et al., 2011; Diallo and Donkor, 2020; Khanal et al., 2018; Dessalegn et al., 2022). Ultimately, these results provide a basis for policies intended to facilitate the promotion of agriculture, for the design or redesign of agricultural programs and investments in the agricultural sector in rural Senegal. Findings are particularly important for the design of policies aimed at developing and promoting effective resilience strategies to deal with agricultural shocks, and hence offer guidance towards the achievement of SDG2: Zero hunger.
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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