Sorghum Farmers’ Climate Change Adaptation Strategies in the Semiarid Region of Cameroon

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter deals with the problem of sorghum farmers’ adaptation to climate change in the semiarid region of Cameroon. Its general objective is to compare the various adaptation strategies’ typologies and to characterize the sorghum farmers’ adaptation strategies on the basis of the suitable one. The stratified random sampling method was used to select the sites, which consist of twenty (20) villages, and the sample, which consists of six hundred (600) farm household heads. After conducting focus-groups in ten villages and interviews with resource persons, the primary data were collected using a semi-open survey questionnaire. It appears that the poor spatiotemporal distribution of rains and the drought constitute, respectively, the main climate hazard and the main water risk that farmers are dealing with; the farmers are vulnerable to climate change because the adaptation strategies used are mostly traditional, their adoption rates are very low, and the use of efficient adaptation strategies (irrigation, improved crop varieties) is almost unknown. The characterization of the adaptation strategies used shows that they are more complex than most authors who have established the typologies thought. It comes out that improving the resilience of these sorghum farmers absolutely requires the improvement of their basic socioeconomic conditions.