An Assessment of Factors Influencing Forest Harvesting in Smallholder Tobacco Production in Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe: An Application of Binary Logistic Regression Model

Abstract

Deforestation is one of the major effects posed by the smallholder tobacco farming as the farmers heavily depend on firewood sourced from natural forest for curing tobacco. The research aims at assessing the factors that influence the harvesting of natural forest in the production of tobacco. Data is collected through the structured questionnaire from 60 randomly selected farmers. Binary logistic regression model is used to explain the significance of factors influencing natural forest harvesting. Results show that farmer experience, tobacco selling price, and agricultural training level negatively affect the harvesting of natural forests (to obtain firewood) for curing tobacco significantly (p<0.05). However, gender, size of the household, tobacco yield, and level of education are insignificant (p>0.05) in influencing natural forest harvesting. Though farmers are exploiting the environment and at the same time increasing foreign currency earning through tobacco production, there is therefore a need to put in place policies that encourage sustainable forest product utilization such as gum plantations, subsidizing price of coal, and introducing fees, as well as penalties or taxes to the offenders.

Woody biomass increases across three contrasting land uses in Hurungwe, mid-Zambezi valley, Zimbabwe

“…The study area has a mean annual rainfall of 750 to 1000 mm, concentrated between mid-November and the end of March (Anderson et al 1993). Soils vary from loamy sand to sandy clay loam soils under typical miombo woodland vegetation dominated by Brachystegia and Julbernardia species (Chivuraise et al 2016). Subsistence agriculture is the primary source of livelihood, with maize, groundnuts, cotton and tobacco as the major crops, and cattle, goats, and sheep as the major livestock (Ncube 2011).…”

Application of geospatial techniques and binary logistic regression model for analyzing driving factors of urban growth in Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia

“…The logistic regression model is one of these techniques for empirical simulation. The logistic regression model has been used for studding different research problems such as forest coverage [ [45] , [46] , [47] ], urban development [ 8 , 43 ] and land use land cover change [ [48] , [49] , [50] ], predicting future trends in land use change [ 44 , 51 ] and urban sprawl [ [52] , [53] , [54] ]. Literatures revealed that logistic regression presents a clear picture of the weight of independent variables and their respective functions, as well as a good grasp of urban growth and urban growth processes (Aithal et al, 2017; Ramachandra et al, 2013 [ 55 , 56 ]; LRM allows and considers all socio-economic, physical, and demographic factors involved in the land use transformation and urban growth process, which are not available in many models and techniques [ 57 ].…”

The Adoption of Strategies to Reduce Deforestation from Tobacco Production: A Case of Smallholder Farmers in Headlands Area of Makoni District

“…This wood is taken mainly from indigenous trees, resulting in deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss (Sacchetto, 2012;Madamombe et al, 2019) Soil degradation and deforestation have resulted from tobaccorelated farming practices in low and middle-income countries. (Chivuraise, 2011;Zvobgo and Tsoka, 2021;Kamuti, 2022). The increased demand for natural forest firewood used in tobacco curing has increased the rate of deforestation in Zimbabwe.…”

“…Contrary to most countries outside Africa, these produce flue-cured rather than naturally dried tobacco. As a result, there is a high rate of deforestation in natural forests from tobacco production(Chivuraise, 2011) According to WHO (2021), the major tobacco-growing countries in Africa are Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, as shown in Figure1. More than 70% of African…”