EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adoption of Drought Tolerant Maize Varieties under Rainfall Stress in Malawi

Samson P. Katengeza (), Stein Holden () and Rodney W. Lunduka
Additional contact information
Samson P. Katengeza: Centre for Land Tenure Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Postal: Centre for Land Tenure Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, P.O. Box 5003, NO-1432 Aas, Norway
Rodney W. Lunduka: CIMMYT- Southern Africa Regional Office (SARO), Postal: PO Box MP 163, Mount Pleasant Harare, Zimbabwe

No 4/17, CLTS Working Papers from Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies

Abstract: This paper examines adoption of drought tolerant (DT) maize varieties under rainfall stress in Malawi using a Mundlak-Chamberlain panel Probit model with a Control Function approach. DT maize varieties is a promising technology that has the capacity to help smallholder farmers adapt to drought risks. Using a four-round panel data spanning nine years from six districts, results show an increase in adoption from 2% in 2006 to 41% in 2015. The paper finds a positive impact of one year and two years lag of longest early dry spells and two years lag of late dry spells on the likelihood of adoption but a negative impact of one year lag of late dry spell. The positive findings imply that farmers learn from previous exposure to drought and respond by adopting weather riskreducing technologies such as DT maize. Furthermore, the impact of lagged early droughts suggests that farmers show a high preference for early maturing DT maize. However, the conflicting results of late dry spells with one year lag reporting negative and two years lag positive suggest that farmers do not immediately respond to late drought shock by adopting DT maize but rather take time to appreciate the significance of the varieties as a technology that survive better under drought during maize flowering phase. These findings could imply that there is still limited awareness among smallholder farmers in Malawi on the benefits of DT maize. There is a need therefore to improve on good extension messages to allow farmers make better-informed decisions.

Keywords: Drought tolerant (DT) maize; drought exposure; early and late droughts; Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP); Mundlak-Chamberlain; Malawi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2017-03-10, Revised 2019-10-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nmbu.no/download/file/fid/40500 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Adoption of Drought Tolerant Maize Varieties under Rainfall Stress in Malawi (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Adoption of Drought Tolerant Maize Varieties under Rainfall Stress in Malawi (2016) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nlsclt:2017_004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CLTS Working Papers from Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies Centre for Land Tenure Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, P.O. Box 5003, NO-1432 Aas, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Ephrida Tione ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:hhs:nlsclt:2017_004