Climate and political effects on agriculture: Empirical evidence from SSA

Abstract

The most of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have been affected by climate change and food insecurity problems due to the reduction of production and productivity of cereal crops in the continent. The purpose of this research was to examine the short-run and long-run effects of climate change on agricultural productivity in 24 selected SSA countries. In the study, a systematic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) Model was used with recent data from 24 SSA countries from 2001 to 2020. The panel regression result revealed that temperature and precipitation showed positive significant effects whereas carbon dioxide emission had negatively influenced the cereal crop productivity in the region. Specifically, the empirical result indicates that a one percent increase in precipitation increases cereal crop productivity by 0.27%. The empirical result of the GMM model revealed that political stability, temperature, GDP per capita, trade openness, carbon dioxide emission, fertilizer consumption, and precipitation have both short-run and long-run effects, while precipitation has only a short-run effect on agricultural productivity in the study area. A key implication of this work is the realization of the lagging effects of climate change in determining cereal crop production and productivity. This study was unable to include all SSA countries because the excluded countries did not have sufficient data on the selected variables in the study. Hence, adopting high-temperature and drought-resistant types of enhanced cereal crops is advised to combat the negative effects of climate change in the study area.