Determinants of Cassava Farmers’ Climate Risk Aversion in Anambra State, Nigeria

Climate challenges can be very discouraging in contemporary agricultural business and stakeholders can only avoid associated risk for increasing output. Providing empirical evidence of the factors that account for farmers’ climate change risk aversion in Anambra state, Nigeria for policy direction is imperative. Data were collected from 203 cassava based farmers in the state using a multi-stage sampling technique but only 141 of them were found useful for data analysis. Descriptive statistics and econometric tool like multinomial logit model (MLM) were used to analyze data collected. Result shows that majority (46.1%) of the farmers had formal education and above 11 years of experience (56.7%), which implied that farmers number of years and training can favourably enhance their understanding the variation in climate and adopt good climate smart agricultural practices for more production efficiency. Analysis of farmers’ aversion level showed that majority (67.38%) of the farmers were mild risk seekers with only 5 Climate Smart Agricultural (CSA) practices and only 5.67% were high risk averse farmers who adopted more (16) of the CSA practices. Few (2.84%) high risk seekers adopted only 2 CSA practices implying that risk loving cassava farmers in the area are not climate smart friendly in the area. Risk aversion increases with factors like age (0.0035) farm-size (0.217) and previous production losses (7.7X10-8) but decreases with economic size (4.42X10-3), experience (0.071) and debt ratio (0.002). However, risk seeking increases with education (0.014), debt ratio (0.0002), economic size (4.49X10-8) and decreases with previous production loss (7.75X10-8). The study recommended that; there is need for policies directed towards CSA practices that will increase economic size of cassava production and also there is need for functional and effective extension services.