Abstract
We analyse gender differences in the response of smallholder farmers to droughts, taking the duration and severity of the event into account. Using a novel weather shock measure that combines spatial rainfall data with detailed cropping calendars, survey data from Uganda and standard econometric techniques, we find that adverse weather events provide an opportunity for women to enter the commercial crop market by allocating land from subsistence to income generating crops. This counterintuitive pattern is, in part, explained by the greater propensity of men to allocate time to non-agricultural activities in the event of weather shocks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 829-856 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Journal of Agricultural Economics |
| Volume | 72 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 10 Feb 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Sept 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Jennifer Golan is in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, UK. Email: [email protected] for correspondence. Peter Agamile and Ralitza Dimova are both in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. Peter Agamile gratefully acknowledges financial support of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK for funding his PhD. We are thankful for comments received from Roshan Adhikari, Tim Foster, Jann Lay and Adam Ozanne. We thank David Harvey (the editor handling this submission) and various referees who made comments on earlier versions of this paper that substantially improved it. We also thank conference participants of the Sustainability and Development Conference (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) for useful suggestions. All errors are our own.
Keywords
- Crop choices
- gender
- land allocation
- smallholder farmers
- sub-Saharan Africa
- weather shocks
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
- Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous)