César Salazar-Espinoza, Sam Jones and Finn Tarp have published an article in Food Policy

The paper entitled “Weather shocks and cropland decisions in rural Mozambique” has been published by Food Policy. The paper looks at how cropland use decisions interact with climate shocks. Using survey data from Mozambique, the paper quantifies how farmers adjust the relative shares of their farm land under different crops after experiencing a weather shock. We account for the bounded nature of land shares and estimate a Pooled Fractional Probit model for panel data. Our results show that crop choice is sensitive to past weather shocks. Farmers shift land use away from cash and permanent crops one year after a drought and from horticulture and permanent crop after a flood. However, this reallocation seems temporary as farmers devote less land to staples after two periods. This is consistent with the aim of maintaining a buffer stock of staples for home consumption.