The Economic Impact of Climatic Variations on Ivorian Rice Farming

Abstract

This study analyzes the economic impact of climatic variations on rice cultivation in Côte d'Ivoire. It attempts to respond to the lack of academic study at the national level and then to introduce a new approach that corrects the bias of the traditional Ricardian approach. We estimate an endogenous switching regression model to control for the effect of irrigation using a survey data from a national sample of 895 rice farmers. The results of our estimates show that Ivorian rice cultivation is significantly affected by variations and dispersion of rainfall. The elasticity of farmers’ net income in relation to rainfall is 0.47 in rain-fed systems and 2.89 in irrigated systems. A decrease in the annual rainfall volume affects negatively the yield of farms both in rain-fed and irrigated systems. However, irregular rainfall or greater annual dispersion of precipitation has a negative impact only on the yield of rain-fed farms. Indeed, irrigation practices make it possible to respond effectively to highly dispersed precipitation during the year. The results suggest that farmer training, support services, and irrigation practices are the relevant options to better adapt rice farming to climatic variations.