Resilience of irrigated agricultural systems to climate change challenges in central-eastern region of Tunisia

Houcine Jeder, Emna Ben Hamza, Hatem Belhouchette and Aida Mzoughi

Agricultural Economics Review, 2019, vol. Volume 20, issue Issue 01

Abstract: Tunisia is among the Mediterranean countries that are threatened by climate change. The agricultural sector is the economic sector that will be most affected by this phenomenon. Thinking of adequate adaptation policies to increase the resilience of certain agricultural production systems is a fundamental condition for ensuring the sustainability of agricultural activity, especially irrigated agriculture. To assess the degree of resilience of irrigated agricultural production systems in the centraleastern region of Tunisia, case of Kalâa Kebira, a bio-economic model was applied to analyze the impact of two scenarios. The first represents only the variation of climate change while in the second one, we add an integrated policy based on the pricing of irrigation water and the subsidy of the purchase cost of seasonal potato seeds. The results of the simulation confirmed the negative economic and environmental impacts of climate change on small scale intensive farms and also large farms in general. The intervention of the public government through an integrated policy is likely to improve the degree of resilience of farms through a compromise between the economic objective (the agricultural income) and the environmental objective (soil salinity) for semi-intensive farms in the study area.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Land Economics/Use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aergaa:330634

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.330634

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