Relating Rainfall Patterns to Agricultural Income: Implications for Rural Development in Mozambique

Abstract

Abstract Rural farmers in Mozambique rely on rain-fed agriculture for food and income, yet they experience high rainfall variability ranging from extreme drought to flooding rainfall from tropical cyclone systems. To explore linkages between rainfall and agriculture, the authors regress changes in annual household per capita agricultural income on reliance on staple food crops, agricultural and demographic characteristics, and rainfall patterns using longitudinal data for rural households for 2002 and 2005. They characterize rainfall patterns by defining nine rainfall zones using the percent of normal rainfall received in each month of three agricultural growing seasons and rainfall from two tropical cyclones that occurred during the study period. Results show that in a period where monthly rainfall seldom occurred in normal amounts, most households experienced decreases in agricultural income. Even after controlling for rainfall patterns, they find that greater household dependency on staple crop agriculture is associated with declining annual agricultural income. They also find that areas affected by both wet and dry rainfall extremes in the first year of the study had decreases in the well-being of rural households when measured two years later. Taken together, their findings suggest that antipoverty policies focused on increasing agricultural income seem likely to fail in countries characterized by highly variable rainfall and exposure to extreme events, particularly when coupled with high levels of poverty and widespread dependence on rain-fed agriculture.