Modeling the impact of climatic and non-climatic factors on cereal production: evidence from Indian agricultural sector

Abstract

The underpinned study examines the effects of climatic and non-climatic factors on Indian agriculture, cereal production, and yield using the country-level time series data of 1965-2015. With the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach, the long-term equilibrium association among the variables has been explored. The results reveal that climatic factors like CO2 emissions and temperature adversely affect agricultural output, while rainfall positively affects it. Likewise, nonclimatic factors, including energy used, financial development, and labor force, affect agricultural production positively in the long run. The estimated long-run results further demonstrate that CO2 emissions and rainfall positively affect both cereal production and yield, while temperature adversely affects. The results exhibit that the cereal cropped area, energy used, financial development, and labor force significantly and positively impact the long-run cereal production and yield. Finally, pairwise granger causality test confirmed that both climatic and non-climatic factors are significantly influencing agriculture and cereal production in India. Based on these results, policymakers and governmental institutions should formulate coherent adaptation measures and mitigation policies to tackle the adverse climate change effects on agriculture and its production of cereals.

Farmer's Perception on Climatic Factors and Social-economic Characteristics in the Agricultural Sector of Gujarat

“…Therefore, these variables appeared as significant inputs for the agricultural sector. Earlier studies like Ashraf and Singh [5] ; Kumar [9] ; Kumar et al [16] ; Chandio et al [22] ; Ashraf and Singh [45] ; Singh [73] have also noticed a positive impact of mentioned inputs in the agricultural sector. Thereafter, income from cash crops farming also showed a positive impact on farm income.…”

“…Therefore, institutional support has a positive involvement to increase farm income [5,47] . It is consistently accepted that climate change is highly responsible to reduce the farm income and productivity of food-grain and crops in India [1,[8][9][10]15,22,23,[25][26][27][28][29]32,36,59] . Therefore, CAS may be effective to mitigate the climate change impact in the Indian agricultural sector.…”

“…Therefore, 31 factors in five categories: (i) Climate change, (ii) Social-economic, (iii) Agricultural input, (iv) Technological development and appropriate technology, and (v) Institutional support and CAS-related variables were used (Table 1). Previous studies have used climatic and nonclimatic factors to observe the impact of climate change in the agricultural sector [1,2,8,16,22,32] . Few studies have considered only climatic factors to assess the impact of climatic factors on production, yield and cropped area of foodgrain and cash crops [26,28] .…”

“…While, per hectare farm income from cash crops was also estimated separately. Gross cropped area, irrigated and non-irrigated area, use of agricultural labour per hectare, farm income from cash crops farming, fertilizer application per hectare, number of livestock and crop diversification index (CDI) were considered as agricultural inputs [4,5,22,45] . Cash crop farming is also useful to increase farmers' income and economic capacity [1] .…”

“…Thus, the agricultural sector has a greater contribution to sustaining the social-economic development of a farming community in India. As India is located at low latitudes, therefore, its agricultural sector is highly vulnerable due to climate change [9,14,15,22,23] . In India, numerous studies have examined the climate change impact on agricultural production, food-grain yield and commercial crops, agricultural productivity and agricultural GDP at district, state and national levels [1,2,[8][9][10]16,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] .…”