Assessing Smallholder Farmers’ Responses to Climate Shocks and Adaptation Strategies: Implications for Agricultural Policy and Sustainable Development in FCT-Abuja

This paper explored how smallholder farmers respond to and cope with climate shocks in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, Nigeria. Quantitative research design was adopted and data were gathered from 80 farmers through semi-structured survey, and analysed with descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. The results indicated that the common climate shocks experienced by farmers are irregular rainfall, heat stress, and pest/disease outbreaks, out of which 85% of the farmers recorded a moderate to severe effect on agricultural production. In spite of these, a large percentage of respondents 87.3% were found to have at least embraced one of these adaptation strategies such as non-farm income, crop diversification, use of better seeds, and crop diversification. Nevertheless, regression findings depict that age, education, farm type and size are examples of key socio-demographic predictors of adaptation behaviour but are not statistically significant. The findings indicate that adaptation is mostly necessity based driven and influenced by structural constraints such as low access to finance, high input prices, and poor institutional support. Interestingly, it was found that 95% of the respondents did not receive any extension services, and 79.8% of them indicated that current agricultural policies were insufficient. The papers concludes that while adaptation measures exists, it is incremental with certain limitations. Policy responses should thus go beyond the principles of encouraging adaptation to the reality of overcoming the existing structural impediments which constrain the ability of farmers to gain sustainable resilience.