Communal farmers' perception of drought in South Africa: Policy implication for drought risk reduction

Bahta, Yonas T.; Jordaan, Andries; Muyambo, Fumiso

doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2016.10.007

Cited by 63 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…For example, Raphael et al (2009) found that the odds of perceived drought being very likely to continue, were significantly higher in women than in men when considering the concern for self or family. Similarly, some studies found that as a demographic characteristic, gender had a critical influence in decisions on drought and agricultural activities (Bahta et al, 2016;Muyambo et al, 2017). The results confirm that animal production is a male dominated career in the studied area, with very little youth involvement.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

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Drought Preparedness Status of Farmers in the Nguni Cattle Development Project and the Sire Subsidy Scheme in North West Province, South Africa

Bareki¹

2017

Appl. Ecol. Env. Res.

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Abstract. The objective of this study was to assess the drought preparedness status of the farmers that benefited from the Nguni Cattle Development Project and the Sire Subsidy Scheme in North West Province, South Africa. The data were collected using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to research, through a semi-structured questionnaire with five sections that probed into: A) personal information, B) farmer socio-economic resources, C) farm operational resources, D) access to Early Warning Information, and E) constraints to drought preparedness. Collected data were coded, captured and analysed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS (version 23) into frequency counts, percentages, graphs and tables. The results revealed that, majority of the respondents were African (97.6%); male (74.1%); married (64.3%); between 50 and 64 years of age (43.5%) and (38.8%) had high school education, respectively. Furthermore, most (76%) respondent farmers were not drought prepared with regard to grazing availability; 20% of the farmers were found to have non-dependable sources of water; 60% of the farms did not have any structural units for maintaining fodder banks and 63% did not have enough fodder reserves. Most respondents (84%) had never received drought related early warning information. Respondents cited lack of money (62%) and deficiency of information (58%) as the major constraints to their drought preparedness. The study recommends that the agricultural extensionists' plausible contact (95%) with the farmers should be used to also educate farmers on effective drought mitigation strategies and for dissemination of early warning information.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

“…The impact of droughts already severed the South African agricultural sector, largely affecting the extensive farming areas. In South Africa, drought has already cost farmers' losses of up to ten million rand (R10m) in 2015 (Bahta et al, 2016). Drought is however a common phenomenon in semi-arid and arid ecosystems (Coppock, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drought Preparedness Status of Farmers in the Nguni Cattle Development Project and the Sire Subsidy Scheme in North West Province, South Africa

Bareki¹

2017

Appl. Ecol. Env. Res.

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“…Education is very important in developing a community. The lack of education is associated with marginalisation and poverty, and less educated farmers have a greater probability of lagging behind in terms of gaining access to information and technology (Bahta, Jordaan & Muyambo, 2016). Afzal, Al-Subaiee and Mirza (2016) emphasised that to get the necessary information, scientific education and some sort of scientific approach is required, the absence of which may act as a hindrance to farmers with no formal education.…”

Section: Socio-economic Characteristics Of the Respondentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception and understanding of agricultural extension: perspective of farmers and public agricultural extension in Taba Nchu

Cloete¹,

Bahta²,

Marunga³

et al. 2019

S Afr. Jnl. Agric. Ext.

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Agriculture is a backbone for the overall development of Africa. It is widely acknowledged that the small-scale farmers need empowerment through extension services to achieve the National Development Plan of South Africa. The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of different role players on the concept of agricultural extension service in South Africa. This study concentrated on the rarely assessed different role players' concept of extension service, especially farmers and agricultural extension officers with respect to the objective of extension, agricultural extension principles, extension teaching, and methods teaching aids and tools. The results found that a general mismatch exists between farmers and agricultural extension officers on the conceptualisation of indicators such as extension objectives and teaching methods. A match exits on indicators of extension principles as well as teaching aids and tools. The article suggests that to promote sustainable agricultural development, agricultural extension should be critically considered with the development policy of ending hunger and poverty in South Africa.

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“…Over the past four decades, South Africa has faced a series of economically damaging droughts, however the 2015 drought stands out as the most extreme [15], costing farmers losses of up to R10m (USD $698,850) [16]. During this period, the country received a record-setting (403 mm) annual rainfall since the South African Weather Service began collecting rainfall data in 1904 [17]; a record lower than the historical mean annual rainfall of 739 mm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsupervised Clustering of Forest Response to Drought Stress in Zululand Region, South Africa

Xulu

Peerbhay

Gebreslasie

et al. 2019

Forests

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Drought limits the production of plantation forests, notably in the drought-prone Zululand region of South Africa. During the last 40 years, the country has faced a series of severe droughts, however that of 2015 stands out as the most extreme and prolonged. The 2015 drought impaired forest productivity and led to widespread tree mortality in this region, but the identification of tree response to drought stress remains uncertain because of its spatial variability. To address this problem, a method that can capture drought patterns and identify trees with similar reactions to drought stress is desired. This could improve the accuracy of detecting trees suffering from drought stress which is key for forest management planning. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the utility of unsupervised mapping approaches in compartments of Eucalyptus trees with similar drought characteristics based on the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and to demonstrate the value of cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) resources for rapid landscape drought monitoring. Our results showed that calculating distances between pixels using three different matrices (Random Forest (RF) proximity, Euclidean and Manhattan) can accurately detect similarities within a dataset. The RF proximity matrix produced the best measures, which were clustered using Wards hierarchical clustering to detect drought with the highest overall accuracy of 87.7%, followed by Manhattan (85.9%) and Euclidean similarity measures (79.9%), with user and producer results between 84.2% to 91.2%, 42.8% to 98.2% and 37.2% to 94.7%, respectively. These results confirm the value of the RF proximity matrix and underscore the capability of automatic unsupervised mapping approaches for monitoring drought stress in tree plantations, as well as the value of using GEE for providing cost effective datasets to resource stricken countries.

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Communal farmers' perception of drought in South Africa: Policy implication for drought risk reduction

Cited by 63 publications

References 17 publications

Drought Preparedness Status of Farmers in the Nguni Cattle Development Project and the Sire Subsidy Scheme in North West Province, South Africa

Drought Preparedness Status of Farmers in the Nguni Cattle Development Project and the Sire Subsidy Scheme in North West Province, South Africa

Perception and understanding of agricultural extension: perspective of farmers and public agricultural extension in Taba Nchu

Unsupervised Clustering of Forest Response to Drought Stress in Zululand Region, South Africa

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