Drivers of abrupt and gradual changes in agricultural systems in Chad
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Drivers of abrupt and gradual changes in agricultural systems in Chad Erik Nilsson 1
&
Per Becker 2,3 & Cintia Bertacchi Uvo 1
Received: 24 April 2019 / Accepted: 26 May 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The countries in the Sahel are undergoing rapid changes due to a mixture of demographic, ecological, and economic transformations. Rural livelihoods in these countries are predominantly engaged in agriculture, which is a foundational component of both food security and the general economy. The relationships between ongoing socio-economic transformation and the agricultural sector are clearly important to address poverty and sustainable development, but have received little academic attention on a subnational level of analysis. This paper addresses this by bringing together new datasets on demography, international aid, food security reports, and soil moisture to analyze the drivers of change in the agricultural sector on a subnational level in Chad. Both regression analyses and qualitative methods based on descriptions in food security reports are used to evaluate the relationships between these datasets to agricultural statistics for the period 1990–2016. It finds that changes to crop water availability from rainfall largely are decoupled from the long-term increases in crop production. On the other hand, it shows that population changes and international aid can explain differences in long-term agricultural changes between Chad’s regions. Moreover, stochastic factors such as farm support programs, market prices, access to new markets, and accommodation of refugees are identified as important to grasp abrupt changes in the crop production. Beyond the specific findings for Chad, this study presents a framework for improved evaluation of the drivers behind subnational crop production on multi-annual and decadal time scales, with broad applicability to agricultural systems in the Sahel. Keywords Agricultural production . Population . International aid . Livelihood analysis . Soil moisture . Sahel
Introduction Agricultural production in countries in the Sahel has undergone substantial changes over the past three decades (FAO 2018a; FAO and AfDB 2015). While this has been reported
Communicated by Chinwe Ifejika Speranza Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01668-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Erik Nilsson [email protected] 1
Division of Water Resources Engineering, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, S.E-221 00 Lund, Sweden
2
Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
3
Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa
on the national level for a number of countries (FAO and AfDB 2015), a detailed understanding of the drivers of these changes is generally lacking (Fuglie and Rada 2013). Although a range of generic drivers commonly are proposed, such as population increase, technological cha
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