Weather variability and food consumption : Evidence from Uganda

In the wake of the continuing debate on the effects of climate change on households’ wellbeing, this study considers the impact of short-term weather variations, as an indicator of climatic change, on food consumption of rural households in Uganda. After defining and placing climatic shocks in the litera-ture on shocks and vulnerability, the paper explores the channels through which weather variations may affect rural household welfare in the context of a subsistence agricultural system such as Uganda. For the purpose of the analy-sis, we combined households data from the World Bank LSMS panel dataset on Uganda covering the period 2005/06-2009/10 with weather data from 13 synoptic stations across the four regions of the country. Weather variations were described by rainfall, number of rainy days and temperature deviations from their respective long term means calculated over the period 1960-90 (1980-2010 for temperatures) thanks to data compiled by the Ministry of Water and Environment, Department of Meteorology of Uganda. The results of the empirical model suggest that weather variability has relatively minor effects on food consumption. In particular, household welfare is affected by deviations in the number of rainy days and minimum temperatures with the effects depend-ing on the season in which they occurred. The relatively minor impact of weather variations on food consumption, combined with the analysis of other studies and agricultural sector recent de-velopments showing relatively small effects of climatic shocks, suggests that rural households are involved in ex-ante income smoothing strategies that in-sure them from the adverse effects of weather variability on food consumption in the country. Future research should examine the effects of weather variabil-ity on agricultural production or income generation process in order to obtain a better understanding of how households may have been adapting to weather changes. Relevance to Development Studies In light of the concerns about climate change effects on households’ welfare, this study attempts to analyze the impact of short term weather variations as indicators of a change in the pattern of climate. However, as the study has sug-gested, poor rural households have been able, to a certain extent, to adapt to continuous changes in weather indicators in such a way that their food con-sumption is only slightly affected by shocks to the agricultural production and income, although agriculture is still conducted on a subsistence basis. In light of this, catastrophic predictions on the potential effects of climate change, at least in the current context, seem to be exaggerated. Attention should be given to understand how to enhance households adaptation strategies to fully ensure their welfare from adverse climatic shocks. In particular, Uganda appears to be an example of ex-ante adaptation to the (not much explored) potential effects of climatic shocks in the country.