Climate change adaptation strategies and production efficiency: The case of citrus farmers in the Limpopo province, South Africa

Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Climate change adaptation strategies and production efficiency: The case of citrus farmers in the Limpopo province, South Africa
 
Creator Joseph, Samuel Antwi, Michael A. Chagwiza, Clarietta Rubhara, Theresa T
 
Subject Agriculture, Economics, Development climate change; adaptation strategies; stochastic frontier production function; profit efficiency; technical efficiency.
Description Climate change adaptation policies and strategies have inevitably become an integral component of agricultural production on a global scale. The evaluative extent to which these adaptation techniques have influenced agricultural productivity is inherently exiguous. Citrus production in tropical regions such as South Africa, is more vulnerable to climate change as the region already experience hot and dry climate, hence the need to implement different strategies for climate change adaption in these regions. This study was designed to assess the effect of adopting the following climate change adaptation measures: planting drought resistant varieties, rainwater harvesting, planting early maturing varieties, integrated pest management (IPM) , changing fertiliser type, and applying drip irrigation to manage climate challenges on the production efficiency of citrus farmers in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The stochastic frontier production function with Cobb Douglas production functional form was used to analyse the productivity of farmers’ vis-à-vis adopted climate change strategies. A survey was conducted and data were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire administered to respondents from 235 production units in the five district municipalities of Limpopo. The likelihood ratio tests for profit models showed that farmers were profit efficient considering the identified adaptation strategies. The variables that influenced profit efficiency was price of fertiliser (p 0.010) and water cost (p 0.010). The inefficiency model showed that besides changing fertiliser as an adaptation measure, the other adaptation strategies including IPM, water harvesting and planting drought resistant varieties did not change the profit efficiency of farmers. Therefore, the results indicate that citrus farmers can still adapt to climate change and remain profit efficient.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2021-11-29
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/jamba.v13i1.1093
 
Source Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; Vol 13, No 1 (2021); 7 pages 1996-1421 2072-845X
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://jamba.org.za/index.php/jamba/article/view/1093/2149 https://jamba.org.za/index.php/jamba/article/view/1093/2150 https://jamba.org.za/index.php/jamba/article/view/1093/2151 https://jamba.org.za/index.php/jamba/article/view/1093/2152
 
Coverage Limpopo Province South Africa — Citrus farmers
Rights Copyright (c) 2021 Samuel Joseph, Michael A. Antwi, Clarietta Chagwiza, Theresa T. Rubhara https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ADVERTISEMENT