An Assessment of Climatic Shocks and Cocoa Production Losses in Ondo East Local Government Area, Nigeria

By:

Since the post-independence era, cocoa remains one of the leading agricultural exports in Nigeria. In addition to ageing cocoa trees and land degradation, recent fluctuations in cocoa production have been traced to changes in some climatic variables, some of which adaptation mechanisms are very slow to come by. Repositioning the Nigerian agriculture as the leading source of foreign exchange requires that cocoa production be enhanced. This study assessed factors explaining farmers’ experiences of climatic shocks and the impact of some of the shocks on production losses. Data were collected from some randomly selected farmers from 4 cocoa growing villages. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression and Tobit regression were employed for data analysis. We derived some composite indices of climatic shocks from four binary variables - experience of cocoa tree death due to capsid, experience of seedling mortality, experience of black pod disease due to excessive rainfall and having to re-spray cocoa pods due to unexpected rainfall- using the PCA. Applying OLS to these indices showed that experience of climatic disturbance significantly reduces (p<0.05) with cocoa farm size (-0.0.12), family labour (-0.070), having other sources of income (-0.335) and excess amount being spent on cocoa bean processing (-0.047) and significantly increases (p<0.05) with the number of hours used to re-spray cocoa (0.124). Tobit regression results showed that the impact of climatic shocks on cocoa production will significantly reduce (p<0.05) with increase in the number of hired labours (-1672.55), years of experience in cocoa production (134.79) and extra cost incurred on processing the beans (362.08), while it significantly increases (p<0.05) with increase in cocoa land areas (440.93) and cost of irrigation (0.343). It was recommended that to reduce the impacts of climatic shocks on cocoa farmers, development of low cost drying machines and skills for engaging in non-farm activities should be promoted.

Stream: Ecosystemic Impacts

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dr Oyekale obtained BSc, MSc and PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.