越南湄公河三角洲水稻農民對氣候變遷的風險認知與反應

Abstract

Rice is the most important food crop in Mekong River Delta, Vietnam. The region is the Vietnam’s rice bowl which produces rice accounting for more than 80% of Vietnam’s annual rice exports. Impacts of climate change in forms of more frequent droughts, floods, crop diseases, and salinity intrusion have undermined rice production, consequently destabilizing rice prices and creating food security issues in the region. To deal with this urgent problem, farmers cultivating rice in the region have changed their actions autonomously and purposely to adapt to the change of climate. In fact, farmers’ disaster experience and risk perception form their behavioral changes (Akerlof, Maibach, Fitzgerald, Cedeno, and Neuman, 2013; Brody, Zahran, Vedlitz, and Grover, 2008; Spence, Poortinga, Butler, and Pidgeon, 2011) Therefore, this study aimed at inv{Spence, 2011 #4}estigating the extreme weather experience of rice farmers in Mekong River Delta, their risk perception to climate change and discover the factors that could affect to farmers’ behavior change to adapt to climate change. Two specific objectives were thus addressed: (1) analyze the disaster experience and risk perception of climate change of farmers cultivating rice, and (2) investigate factors affecting farmers’ behavior change represented by the change of land-use type, migration, and input use in farming activities to impacts of climate variability. The data used for this research came from a farm household survey conducted in the Mekong Delta in January and February of 2014 in which 99 households and 20 village leaders in two provinces of the delta were interviewed. The questionnaire contains their demographic background, their disaster experience, awareness and risk perceptions on different types of risks and changes on land use and family migration. The two models which are ordered probit and probit model is used to identify the factors affecting rice farmers’ risk perceptions and their responses to adapt to climate change. Our estimation results indicate that the risk perception of farmers decreased when farmers had more years of farming and had more interaction with social network. In contrast, age of respondent and disaster experience increased the probability of farmers to feel more degraded by climate change. In addition, the responses of farmers to adapt to climate change was influenced by age of respondent, rice price, disaster experience, and social network variables in a positive way. In contrast, farming experience and rice price lower the probability of farmers to take adaptation to climate change. The findings of the importance of farming experience, farmers’ social interaction and extreme weather events in both risk perception and responses to climate change can be used in preparing the guidelines for government policy makers in designing agricultural adaptation policies for rice farmers in Vietnam.