Effect of Climate Variability on Rice Production in North-Central, Nigeria from 1980– 2020

Abstract

The impacts of climate variability on rice production in Nigeria’s North Central were investigated in this study (1980 – 2020). Respondents were sampled using a multi-stage sampling technique. Data was collected from 450 rice farmers using a standardized questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, conventional least squares, Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH), and the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and t-test were used to examine the variables for stationarity and significance. The majority of responders (70.2%) believe that climatic fluctuation happens naturally. The normality test revealed that the variables were positively skewed; several of the variables had kurtosis values more than 3; and the Jarque-Bera test revealed that the variables were not normally distributed, i.e. the error term did not follow normal distribution. The regression study revealed that rainfall, temperature, relative humidity, and production capacity all had a substantial influence on farmer output in Benue and Nasarawa States, but only average temperature and production capacity did in Niger State. The factor analysis for the study area’s constraint to rice farmers’ awareness and resilience to climatic variability found that the two main components accounted 42.786% of the variance in the analysis. Furthermore, the variables that defined component 1 were a lack of technical know-how (0.694), a religious inclination (0.672), a cultural barrier (0.642), and a language barrier (0.640), whereas the variables that defined component 2 were finance (0.707), insufficient extension contact (0.681), and a lack of appropriate knowledge of climate change and its effects (0.640). (0.528).