Aimable Nsabimana will present at the WIDER Seminar Series on 8 May 2019.
The main objective of this study was to provide evidence on the impact of weather shocks on the intensity of farm input use by smallholder farmers in Africa. Specifically, this paper addresses the question: how do weather shocks affect the intensity of farm input use and land productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa? Given the importance of rainfall and temperature on-farm yield, any shock in weather patterns would eventually affect farmers’ expectations of farm yield. I explore the relationship between weather shocks and the intensity of inputs use at the plot level based on national large-scale panel data from three African countries (Niger, Nigeria, and Tanzania). By combining monthly drought index data (Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)) with rich Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) dataset,
I find that the intensity of chemical fertilizers strongly reduces more in drought areas than less-prone drought areas during growing seasons. I also find that the drought during lean seasons is associated with higher pesticide uptakes. From these results, the suggestive evidence shows that drought weather induces the farmers to reduce purposively farm investments, including yield-enhancing technology like chemical fertilizer, hence worsening adverse farm yield implications.
Aimable Nsabimana is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Rwanda (UR), College of Business and Economics (CBE), department of Economics. He holds PhD in economics from the department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden.
His research interests cut across Development and Agricultural Economics, Applied Economics and Spatial Econometrics. Specifically, he has expertise in using the household survey data, including Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), to analyse welfare effects of different interventions and policies. His teaching load include: Econometrics, Mathematics for Economist and Microeconomics. In addition, he has acquired advanced skills in using Stata, R, QGIS and ArcGIS, among other statistical, spatial and econometric software packages.
The WIDER Seminar Series showcases recent and ongoing work on key topics in development economics. The weekly sessions held in Helsinki are open to local and visiting researchers, policy makers, and others interested in development topics. Click here to learn more.
Seminars will be live streamed on Facebook and recordings and presentations will be available after the event here.
For more information email richardson@wider.unu.edu
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