Abstract
The Thal desert is the third-largest desert in Pakistan, a major part of which consists of dunes. In recent years, a large portion of the Thal farmers has shifted from conventional farming to tree cultivation and border cropping on the dunes. In this study, we compared household income generated from conventional farming and agroforestry. Data on the farming type and various inputs, as well as the demographic characteristics of the farmers, was collected from 382 farm households in the Bhakkar district of Punjab, Pakistan which is one of the six districts of the Thal region. Both OLS-based and endogeneity-adjusted copula correction method (CMM)-based estimates indicated that household income generated from agroforestry (both tree cropping and border cropping) was about three higher than the income generated from conventional farming. However, border cropping being the costliest of all types of farming in terms of input costs, only a small minority of farmers in the Thal desert presently used this farming system. Government interventions such as subsidies and credit facilities can significantly improve the socioeconomic conditions of the farmers by promoting agroforestry in general and border cropping in particular.
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Notes
Farmers in Pakistan generally use tractor-trollies or trucks to deliver their produce to nearby towns or cities. So, the transportation cost in this study is limited to the cost of transporting produce after harvesting is done. The transportation cost that is incurred on buying seeds, for example, is treated under “other costs” because farmers routinely buy household items such as clothing or shoes when they visit towns or cities to buy seeds. Therefore, only the self-reported transport cost that was incurred specifically for farming purpose is considered.
We tested the one-sided hypothesis that each cost variable is greater than 1. We failed to find any evidence of increasing returns to scale.
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Abbas, G., Ali, A., Khan, M. et al. The Transition from Arid Farming Systems to Agroforestry Systems in Pakistan: A Comparison of Monetary Returns. Small-scale Forestry 20, 325–350 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-020-09470-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-020-09470-5