Effectiveness of Farmers’ Risk Management Strategies in Smallholder Agriculture: Evidence from India

Smallholder farmers in developing countries are more vulnerable to climate risks, and most of them, because of a lack of access to institutional risk management measures such as crop insurance, rely on traditional measures to offset the adverse effects of such risks on agricultural production. Employing a multinomial endogenous switching regression technique to the farm-level data, this study first identifies the determinants of farmers’ own risk management measures and then evaluates their impacts on farm income and downside risk exposure. There are three key highlights of this analysis. One, farmers, based on their past exposures to climate risks, endowments of resources, and access to credit and information, often use more than one measure or strategy to mitigate, transfer, and cope with the climate risks. Two, all the risk management strategies are found to be effective in improving farm income and reducing risk exposure, but it is their joint implementation that yields larger payoffs. Three, the joint adoption of different adaptation strategies is positively associated with farm size, but with liquidity and information constraints relaxed, the probability of their joint adoption is expected to increase further. These findings impinge on the concept of climate-smart agriculture and suggest the need to identify and integrate traditional farm management practices with science-based innovations to provide an effective solution to climate risks.