This guide is intended to help extension workers better understand the concept of risk, the situation where risk occurs and management strategies that can be used to reduce, or at least soften, its effect. It is hoped that the guide will be useful in assisting extension workers to provide farmers with advice on the kind of risk management strategies that they can employ to deal with risk in their day-to-day operations. In this way extension workers can help farmers recognize and understand the risks that they are likely to face and assist them in making better farm management decisions that reduce the negative effect of the risks encountered in farming.
This book examines the implications of risk management for policy in agriculture. Opening with a chapter on risk management principles and guidelines for policy design in agriculture, the book goes on to look at quantitative analysis of risk and then at policy in various countries.
A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.
This book investigates the role of wealth in achieving sustainable rural economic development. The authors define wealth as all assets net of liabilities that can contribute to well-being, and they provide examples of many forms of capital – physical, financial, human, natural, social, and others. They propose a conceptual framework for rural wealth creation that considers how multiple forms of wealth provide opportunities for rural development, and how development strategies affect the dynamics of wealth. They also provide a new accounting framework for measuring wealth stocks and flows. These conceptual frameworks are employed in case study chapters on measuring rural wealth and on rural wealth creation strategies. Rural Wealth Creation makes numerous contributions to research on sustainable rural development. Important distinctions are drawn to help guide wealth measurement, such as the difference between the wealth located within a region and the wealth owned by residents of a region, and privately owned versus publicly owned wealth. Case study chapters illustrate these distinctions and demonstrate how different forms of wealth can be measured. Several key hypotheses are proposed about the process of rural wealth creation, and these are investigated by case study chapters assessing common rural development strategies, such as promoting rural energy industries and amenity-based development. Based on these case studies, a typology of rural wealth creation strategies is proposed and an approach to mapping the potential of such strategies in different contexts is demonstrated. This book will be relevant to students, researchers, and policy makers looking at rural community development, sustainable economic development, and wealth measurement.
This paper measures the economic impact of climate on crops in Kenya. The analysis is based on cross-sectional climate, hydrological, soil, and household level data for a sample of 816 households, and uses a seasonal Ricardian model. Estimated marginal impacts of climate variables suggest that global warming is harmful for agricultural productivity and that changes in temperature are much more important than changes in precipitation. This result is confirmed by the predicted impact of various climate change scenarios on agriculture. The results further confirm that the temperature component of global warming is much more important than precipitation. The authors analyze farmers' perceptions of climate variations and their adaptation to these, and also constraints on adaptation mechanisms. The results suggest that farmers in Kenya are aware of short-term climate change, that most of them have noticed an increase in temperatures, and that some have taken adaptive measures.
Farmers in developing countries are frequently exposed to the uncertainties of weather, prices and disease. Thus decision making behaviour plays a crucial role every day, affecting farming operations. The study was carried out in Raichur, Kalaburagi and Koppal districts. From each district, two taluks were selected and from each taluk, two gram panchayats were selected randomly and from each panchayat a village was selected randomly. From each selected village, 15 farmers were randomly selected and the total sample size constituted 180 respondents. The attitude of farmers towards farming in irrigated situation was better than the attitude of farmers in rainfed situation. The overall decision making behaviour was better in irrigated situation compared to rainfed situation. Achievement motivation and decision making behaviour were found to be significantly influencing the annual agricultural income. As the decision making behaviour score increased by one unit, the annual agricultural income increased by 9231.28. Irrigated rainfed dummy, number of years of schooling, achievement motivation, risk orientation and mass media participation were found to be significantly influencing the institutional participation. In irrigated situation, as evident from the experiment, there were 38 per cent of the respondents in the risk averse category. In the case of rainfed situation, it is alarming to note that as high as 52 per cent of the respondents were in the risk averse group on loss of toss. The irrigated farmers were more likely to take up loan in comparison to rainfed farmers. Number of family members had a positive influence on migration while, the decision making behaviour score had a negative influence on migration. There is evidence of framing bias and anchoring bias among the sample respondents. The farmers were willing to pay more for weather information compared to market and plant protection information.
