Coping with drought in rice farming in Asia: insights from a cross‐country comparative study

Abstract

Drought is a major constraint affecting rice production especially in rainfed areas of Asia.Despite its importance in rice growing areas, the magnitude of economic losses arising from drought, its impact on farm households and farmers' drought coping mechanisms are poorly understood. This paper provides insights into these aspects of drought based on a cross-country comparative analysis of rainfed rice growing areas in China, India and Thailand.The economic cost of drought is found to be substantially higher in eastern India than in the other two countries. Higher probability and greater spatial covariance of drought and less diversified farming systems with rice accounting for a large r share of household income are likely to be the main reasons for this higher cost of drought in eastern India. Farmers deploy various coping mechanisms but such mechanisms are largely unable to prevent a reduction in income and consumption, especially in eastern India. As a result, welfare consequences on poor farmers are substantial with a large number of people falling back into poverty during drought years. The overall implications for technology design and for policy improvements for drought mitigation and drought relief are discussed in the light of the empirical findings of the study.

Managing water in rainfed agriculture in the Greater Mekong Subregion

“…The severe regional drought of 1998 was not reflected by a national-level drop in yield or total production (except in Myanmar); neither was the drought of 2004 in Thailand, despite estimates that it affected 2 Mha of crops (Bank of Thailand 2005). This concurs with the results of Ding et al (2005) for southern China and Pandey et al (2007) for Thailand, regarding the difficulties of detecting even major drought events in national production statistics.…”

“…Such adaptations often form an integral part of local farming systems. Pandey et al (2007) pointed out that there can be large opportunity costs associated with these methods if risk-averse farmers employ strategies that reduce impacts in poor years but limit productivity in good years. For example, they might use droughttolerant but low-yielding traditional rice varieties.…”

Is dry soil planting an adaptation strategy for maize cultivation in semi-arid Tanzania?

“…Under such conditions, the risk of income shortfall is reduced by growing maize crops on several fields, and reduced even more when different crops are cultivated. According to Pandey et al (2007), this principle is used in different types of diversification common in rural societies. Examples include the spatial diversification of farms, diversification of agricultural enterprises and diversification from farm to non-farm activities.…”

Screening of some rice varieties and landraces cultivated in Nigeria for drought tolerance based on phenotypic traits and their association with SSR polymorphism

“…The extent to which drought affects yield varies depending on the intensity and the time of occurrence of the stress within the crop growth cycle (Srividhya et al, 2011). Yield losses ranging from 15 to 50% have been reported (Pandey and Bhandari, 2009;Srividhya et al, 2011). The situation becomes more serious with increasing global climate change.…”