Effect of Climate Change on Sugarcane Yield in Pakistan: A District Level Analysis
Climate change is one of the biggest confronting challenges to mankind. The impacts of the climate change have affected agriculture crop sector specifically. Many researchers attempted to compute the effect of climate change mainly on food crops since decades. Although, the estimation technique and construction of the variables were under the great debate and various researchers pointed out problems present in literatures. Therefore, serious attempts are required to estimate the climatic effects on other crop(s) with superior estimation technique and concrete method of variables construction based on strong theoretical background. This study estimated yield and acreage responsiveness of sugarcane crop to climate change in major sugarcane producing districts of Pakistan using fixed effect model and Arellano Bond GMM estimation technique. The results showed that sugarcane yield is more sensitive to precipitation at different phenological stages including germination, tillering and grand growth stages than temperature whereas the effect of agricultural production technology (0.087) was positive. Moreover, severe climatic incidents like drought showed negative impact (-0.024) on the crop yield. Therefore, abrupt changes in climatic condition adversely affected the crop production in Pakistan. Price and non-price factors were important determinants for sugarcane acreage allocation. The result showed that own -price of sugarcane had significant positive impact (0.149) on area allocation. However, the relative prices of substitute crops viz. cotton (-0.027), maize (-0.003) and wheat (-0.22) had negative impact on area allocation. It could be crucial to invest in Research and Development (R&D) for developing improved drought tolerant sugarcane varieties to minimize the risk of yield losses due to changes in climatic conditions in Pakistan. Supervisor:- Dr. Muhammad Iqbal
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