STATEMENT
OF WORK
objectives & hypotheses

Climate Variability and Household Welfare in the Andes:
Farmer adaptation and
use of weather forecasts in decision making

The general objective of this research is twofold, first to determine the way in which markets, assets, indigenous knowledge, life cycle, access to resources, information and  forecasts, and institutions cluster groups with distinct household production strategies in the Altiplano to adjust to climatic variability; and second, to identify the groups that use or would use climatic and weather information in their production decisions and the net returns of using improved forecasts.  

Specific Objectives

I. Develop a  methodology to:

  1. Identify the role of climatic risk in decisions affecting the choice of economic activities, levels of production and levels of consumption at the household level.
  2. Measure the impact of El Niño event of 1997-1998 in a peasant community of the Central Altiplano using a similar approach to that developed by Valdivia and Jetté (1996).
  3. Evaluate the information flows, networks, transactions costs, and mechanisms that rural communities have to access climatic and weather information.
  4. Based on the results from objective #3, assist in identifying the type of climatic information delivery systems best suited  for Andean agriculture.

 II. Test this methodology in a second community of the Altiplano region of the Andes.

  1.  Develop a baseline in a selected community of the Peruvian Altiplano where  data on production and climate from previous years is available.
  2. Test the methods of data collection and analysis developed in the Bolivian Altiplano  in  Southern Peru to validate our approach for identifying strategies under climatic risk.
  3. To identify current information delivery paths and the factors that are necessary to improve decisions with forecasting.

Hypotheses

  1. Access to resources, stage in the life cycle (age and labor), livestock assets, quality of resources, and off farm employment are significant variables in developing distinct economic portfolios.
  2. Access to resources, assets, life cycle, networks and experience with climatic information are predictors of use of forecasts.
  3. High transactions costs preclude farmers and households from accessing climate information.
  4. Farmer and household diversification strategies minimize climatic risk and result in lower net income returns (following Rosenzweig and Binswanger, 1992).
  5. Climatic information will be used only if risk reducing technologies are available. 

 

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