Climate Change, Macroeconomic Factors and the Nigerian Indigenous Meat and Milk Industry: A Long-Memory Approach

This paper investigates the relationship between climate change, macroeconomic variables and indigenous livestock production in Nigeria over the period 1981–2023 using fractional integration and multivariate regression methods. More specifically, it examines how temperature and precipitation anomalies, including their nonlinear (squared) effects, agricultural conditions and macroeconomic factors affect Total Indigenous Livestock Meat (TOLIM), Raw Milk of Cattle (RAMOC), and the combined value of Meat and Milk (TOVOMAMI). Climate variables enter the models in levels, while the other variables are first-differenced and log-transformed where appropriate, to ensure stationarity and balanced regressions. The specifications assuming white noise residuals suggest weak and largely statistically insignificant effects of the climate variables on livestock productivity, and also yield some slight evidence of an impact of macroeconomic factors. By contrast, when imposing an AR(1) specification on the error term, negative effects of permanent pasture and exchange rate depreciation on output values are found. These results suggest possible inefficiencies in land use and macroeconomic vulnerability in Nigeria’s indigenous livestock sector. and provide useful information for designing sustainable livestock adaptation policies in low-income economies.