Crop-Specific Response to Climatic Variability and Agricultural Planning Implications in North West Cameroon

Abstract

The discourse on climate variability has gained prominence over the years, considering the crucial role climate plays in the development of the human society. This perhaps led to the proposition of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13 which stresses on the need to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Unarguably, one of the most affected sectors in this dispensation is the agricultural sector. Crop production in Sub Saharan Africa is predominantly rain-fed and climate variability through fluctuations in rainfall and temperature pose a significant threat to the sustainability of this sector. Although a climatic regime is broadly established for the Western Highland agro-ecological system of Cameroon, specific local peculiarities are necessary to be understood especially in Bali which fairly lies within a transitional zone between the grassfield and the coastal forest zones of Cameroon. In the context of Bali, knowledge gaps exist with respect to crop-specific response to climate variability. An understanding of the crops-specific responses and their agricultural planning implications is necessary. In this paper, we employed an exploratory approach to examine crop-specific responses to climate variability and their implications for agricultural planning. We used the Pearson’s correlation analysis to correlate climatic records (temperature and rainfall) for 25 years (1991-2015) with the output of specific food crops (maize, beans, cassava and cocoyam). We equally underscore the climatic thresholds for the target crops in a bid to understand the deviations thereof. Our analysis led to the conclusion that with a 1% margin of error, both positive and negative correlations exist between crops and the varying climatic elements. By implication, farmers could invest more in the production of more climate tolerant crops in the face of projected increase in temperature.