Farmers Adapt to Extreme Weather Events through Crop Diversification in China

Apr 22, 2014     Email"> PrintText Size

In recent years, extreme weather events (including drought and floods) have become more frequent and serious in China. Increasingly extreme weather events has threatened food security and resulted in massive socio-economic loss. Given the risks posed by increasingly serious extreme weather events, the question of how to adapt to it through appropriate measures has received a great deal of attention from policy makers and researchers.

Crop diversification has been recognized as an effective adaptation option for farmers for risk mitigation, but little empirical analysis has been conducted to determine how extreme weather events influence farmers’ decisions on diversifying their crops. From a literature review, we find that crop diversification has often been examined as a tool to stabilize crop revenue and farm income. There is little empirical study that has quantified the relationship between the occurrence of extreme weather events and farmers’ crop diversification behavior. The overall goals of this study are to examine whether farmers adapt to extreme weather events through crop diversification and to determine which factors influence farmers’ decisions on crop diversification against extreme weather events in China.

Based on a large-scale household and village survey conducted in nine provinces nationwide, Prof. HUANG Jikun and his team from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that farmers respond to extreme weather events by increasing crop diversification. Their decision to diversify crops is significantly influenced by their experiences of extreme weather events in the previous year.

Regression analysis reveals that household characteristics also affect farmers’ decisions on crop diversification strategy. Farmers with larger farms are more likely to diversify their crops. Younger farmers are generally more likely to plant more types of crops than older farmers. Farmers with fewer years of education are more likely to adopt crop diversification as a risk diffusion tool, which implies that these farmers may have difficulties adapting to climate change through other measures. When an extreme weather event occurs, female-headed households are more likely to increase the number of crops to mitigate risk than are male-headed households.

The research indicates that government should strengthen the farmers’ capacity to cope with extreme weather events, because farmers’ ability of adaptation varies from household to household. Specially, older farmers and farmers with small farms may need more attention.

The study result has been published in Journal of Integrative Agriculture (Jikun Huang, Jing Jiang, Jinxia Wang and Lingling Hou, Crop Diversification in Coping with Extreme Weather Events in China, Journal of Integrative Agriculture 2014 13(4): 677-686).