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The effects of environmental stress on global agricultural landownership

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Abstract

The adverse effects of climate change are likely to harm agricultural livelihoods and food supplies worldwide. Faced with challenges resulting from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, some farmers might abandon their occupations. Existing research has found that drier than usual weather reduces landownership rates through these pathways. Such trends could be disruptive at a population level, threatening a country’s economic and political stability. We analyze subnational agricultural landownership data that cover 50 countries on four continents between 2004 and 2017. Our Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) dataset speaks to the experiences of 1,123,714 households. Our predictor of environmental stress is the growing season standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index, which measures deviations from local weather patterns dating back to 1901. We find that drier than average growing season weather is associated with declining landownership rates. For every dry growing season before a DHS survey, the agricultural landownership rate falls by 2.51%. This effect is most robust in African countries, which was the focus of a recent study on this topic, and we offer several plausible interpretations of these regional differences.

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Data availability

Replication files for the analysis producing our results are available on the corresponding authors Harvard dataverse page.

Notes

  1. There is a problematic data generating process in Peru, where DHS gathered data 6 times between 2004 and 2012. One- or two-year intervals for measuring the dependent variable results in overlapping measurement of the key environmental stress-independent variable. While the landownership question was asked in Peru, it is the only country that we exclude from our analysis.

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Funding

This study has been supported by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 268135/E10CROP).

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Andrew Linke & Matthew Shawcroft

  2. Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

    Andrew Linke

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Andrew Linke and Matthew Shawcraft. The first draft of the manuscript was written by both authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Linke, A., Shawcroft, M. The effects of environmental stress on global agricultural landownership. Popul Environ 45, 19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-023-00429-0

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