Assessing the Vulnerability to Drought in Ceara, Northeast Brazil

Draught;Northeast Brazil;Small Farmers Vulnerability to Variability in Rainfall in the State of Ceará in Northeast Brazil;School of Natural Resources and Environment

Brant, SimoneScavia, Donald ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Draught;    Northeast Brazil;    Small Farmers Vulnerability to Variability in Rainfall in the State of Ceará in Northeast Brazil;    School of Natural Resources and Environment;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/57432/Brant_thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the current vulnerability tovariability in rainfall of small farmers in the State of Ceará in Northeast Brazil byidentifying factors that affect a household’s vulnerability and its ability to prepare for, orrespond to, droughts. Understanding these factors can help to identify the householdsmost in need of assistance during a drought and provide a target for programs that buildcapacity to adapt. Assistance programs currently use criteria to identify eligibleprograms. This analysis could also help inform an assessment of whether those criteriaare appropriate for assisting the most vulnerable families.While, overall, we would expect that vulnerability would be tied to poverty, for thisstudy, I make the assumption that within comparable levels of poverty, there are factorsthat may increase the resilience of some households to drought. Hence, although allhouseholds surveyed for this study would be considered poor, I assume that specificfactors—such as land ownership, irrigation or pension income—may make a family moreresilient to drought. Both qualitative and quantitative data and methods are used in thisanalysis. The qualitative section describes the information acquired in interviews withBrazilian experts. These responses were used to inform the selection of variables in thequantitative portion of the analysis. The quantitative piece uses data from a survey ofsmall farmers in two areas of Ceará. Participation in a work front, a state-run temporaryemployment program available only during droughts, is used as a proxy for vulnerabilityto drought since historically work fronts have been used only as a last resort strategywhen families have lost all other alternatives of income. A probit analysis is used toidentify economic and demographic variables that are linked with increased probabilityof participation in the work front. A factor analysis is then used to identify componentsthat explain a significant portion of the variance in the data set and to group householdsinto similar groups. These results are then compared with the outcome of work frontparticipation.Overall, the combination of probit and factor analyses proved successful in identifyinghouseholds that were likely to have joined the work front in the past. The similarity ofresults from the probit and factor analysis supported the results. Additionally, variablesidentified as important determinants of vulnerability to droughts in interviews and theliterature proved to be significant statistically. These key variables include on-farmproduction, non-farm income, particularly pensions, irrigation and plot size.