The effects of environmental stress on global agricultural landownership

The adverse effects of climate change are likely to harm agricultural livelihoods and food supplies worldwide. Faced with challenges resulting from increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, some farmers might abandon their occupations. Existing research has found that drier than usual weather reduces landownership rates through these pathways. Such trends could be disruptive at a population level, threatening a country’s economic and political stability. We analyze subnational agricultural landownership data that cover 50 countries on four continents between 2004 and 2017. Our Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) dataset speaks to the experiences of 1,123,714 households. Our predictor of environmental stress is the growing season standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index, which measures deviations from local weather patterns dating back to 1901. We find that drier than average growing season weather is associated with declining landownership rates. For every dry growing season before a DHS survey, the agricultural landownership rate falls by 2.51%. This effect is most robust in African countries, which was the focus of a recent study on this topic, and we offer several plausible interpretations of these regional differences.