TESTING THE CLIMATE RESILIENCE OF SORGHUM AND MILLET WITH TIME SERIES DATA

Abstract

Cereals are important in meeting the security needs of households and also as an industrial crop for the poultry and brewery industries. In recent times, climate change has been one of the great constraints to crop production and productivity including cereals. Among the various adaptation strategies is the choice and diversification of crops. Following this, there have been claims supported by various scientific disciplines to the effect that millet and sorghum are climate resilient relative to other cereals. This study uses real production data to investigate whether indeed they are climate-resilient. The study used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. The study employs time series data on sorghum and millet production spanning the period of 1970 to 2018 obtained from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA). Further, rainfall and temperature data are obtained from the World Bank climate portal, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission is obtained from Index Mundi, all spanning from the period 1970 to 2018. The results of the analysis confirm the claim that sorghum and millets are indeed climate-resilient and do not respond to changes in climatic parameters. Ljung Box test and the ARCH-LM reveals that the residuals in the models fitted are free from conditional heteroscedasticity as well as serial autocorrelation. The study joins the call for the promotion of these crops in the country for their resilience to climate, whiles continuous effort is made to make the other crops more climate-resilient.