Food security in Tanzania is projected to deteriorate as a result of climate change.
In spite of the Governments efforts to promote agricultural practices that improve
productivity and food security, adoption rates of such practices remain low. Developing
a thorough understanding of the determinants of adoption and updating our
understanding of the impacts of these technologies under the site-specific effects of
climate change are crucial to improve adoption. This paper addresses these issues
by using a novel data set that combines information from two large-scale household
surveys with geo-referenced historical rainfall and temperature data in order to understand
the determinants of the adoption of sustainable and productivity improving
practices and their impacts on maize productivity in Tanzania. The specific practices
analyzed are: maize-legume intercropping, soil and water conservation practices, the
use of organic fertilizers, inorganic fertilizers and high yielding maize varieties. We
find that farmers located in areas where the cropping season’s rainfall has beenhighly variable have 15 percent lower maize yields. Similarly, farmers located in
areas where maximum temperatures during the growing season exceed 30 Celsius
degrees have approximately 25 percent lower yields. Both rainfall variability and
hotter temperatures are expected to increase under climate change, underlining the
importance of policies to buffer food security from the estimated effects of climate
change. Our analysis identifies policy entry points both to improve maize productivity
and the adoption of practices to do so through careful empirical analysis. This
paper contributes to evidence base to support policies for climate smart agriculture
and underlines the importance of integrating site-specific analyses of climatic variables
in policy targeting to foster adoption of appropriate practices to improve food
security under climate change.