Climate Shocks Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from Colonial Tropical Africa

Abstract

Abstract:A rapidly growing body of research examines how weather variability, anomalies and shocks influence economic and societal outcomes. This study investigates the effects of weather shocks on African smallholder farmers in British colonial Africa and intervenes in the debate on the mediating effect of cash crops on resilience to shocks. We employ a dual research strategy, involving both qualitative and econometric analysis. We analyse original primary evidence retrieved from annual administrative records and construct a panel dataset of 151 districts across West, South-central and East Africa in the Interwar Era (1920)(1921)(1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). Our findings are twofold. First, we qualitatively expose a range of mechanisms leading from drought and excessive rainfall to harvest failure and social upheaval. We then test the link econometrically and find a robust U-shaped relation between rainfall deviation and social upheaval, proxied by annual imprisonment. Second, we review a long-standing and unsettled debate on the impact of cash crop cultivation on farmers' resilience to environmental shocks and find that cash crop districts experienced lower levels of social tension and distress in years of extreme rainfall variability.

‘Force of Nature’ : climate shocks, food crises and conflict in Colonial Africa and Asia, 1880-1960. THESIS RETRACTED

“…It seems likely that agricultural commercialization and crop diversification acted as an insurance mechanism to local households by generating an alternative source of income. This result is in line with that of Papaioannou and de Haas (2015) for colonial British Africa and Burgess & Donaldson (2012) for colonial India; both effectively arguing that crop diversification and openness to trade mitigated the adverse effects of weather shocks. …”

“…Interestingly, the vast majority of the studies published on the climate-economy nexus has been mostly restricted to limited comparisons in the post-1960 period, mainly due to data availability (see . Only very recently have scholars begun expanding the temporal scope in the pre-1960 period (for example Bai & Kai-sing Kung (2011) and Jia (2014) for premodern China; Anderson et al (2015) and Bignon et al (2016) for premodern Europe; and Papaioannou & de Haas (2015) for colonial Africa). This study thus expands both the geographical as well as temporal scope of studies on the climate-economy nexus.…”