C HAPTER 8
S YNTHESIS
8.1 Summary
The objective of this thesis is explore the nature, extent and causes of poverty and vulnerability to poverty among households living in fishery depending communities in the yaéres floodplain in North Cameroon, a major floodplain in the Lake Chad Basin. The specific objectives of the thesis are as follows:
1. To explore the extent to which households in fishing communities are exposed to adverse external events such as natural hazards (climate risk) as well as to other covariate and idiosyncratic shocks that may affect production output and hence the expected welfare position of households.
2. To analyze portfolio compositions of households and to describe the income‐risk relationship of specific types of portfolios.
3. To conduct a dynamic poverty analysis, i.e. (1) to estimate vulnerability as expected poverty on household level, (2) to identify the role of fisheries in mitigating risk (low vulnerability) and (3) to explore the cause‐effect relationships of different possible development interventions and vulnerability.
Methodologically, this work is adding to current research on vulnerability by advancing the vulnerability to poverty approach in two ways: First, by incorporating assets into the general vulnerability framework, based on Carter and Barrett’s (2006) asset‐based poverty approach; and second, by proposing and applying the class of lower partial moments (LPM) as a coherent risk measure. Drawing on the portfolio theory, stochastic income
distributions are derived for each household and vulnerability is estimated in terms of the probability and the extent of expected poverty. Hence, household vulnerability has been estimated and analyzed from different angles, which can yield multifaceted and diverse information on the relationship between SSF and vulnerability.
The results presented in this thesis provide crucial information on the value of SSF in mitigating risk and thus contributing to sustainable livelihoods and poverty reduction.
The analysis of adverse external events (Objective 1) shows that the households in the study area are found to be subject to heavy dependence on natural resources, to limited and erratic rainfall, pests and diseases and nutrient poor soils. In particular, the unpredictable climate is having a severe impact on the poor. Climate data from 1951 to 2008 reveal a considerable variation in annual and intra‐annual rainfall, which has an adverse effect on the variation of output from agricultural production and fishing activities. Moreover, households reported to frequently suffer from other shocks, such as death of family members, loss of productive assets or crop pests. Adapting to these conditions, households have diversified their activity portfolio.
Five livelihood activities exist in the study area: agriculture, livestock rearing, fishing, fish trade and off‐farm work (commerce, carpentry, herdsmen, etc.). Agriculture is the main activity of the majority of households in the floodplain, and is dominated by three major crops in terms of input allocation (labor and land) and income: sorghum, millet and rice.
Off‐farm work possibilities are very limited, contributing only about 1.5 percent to aggregate household income. For most households in the Logone floodplain, livestock is used as an income buffer. Farmers accumulate livestock in favorable years where income from agriculture and fishing is high, and sell it in bad years in order to smooth income.
This does not affect farming production decisions in the first place, i.e. income through livestock sales is treated here as an ex post coping action, not as production output. The analysis of activity diversification reveals that fishing‐related activities make a significant contribution to the livelihoods of the peoples in the Logone floodplain, including fishing, fish processing and fish trade. Fishing is a major activity for many households in terms of nutrient supply and income generation. Over 60 percent of households are engaged in
SSF. On average, fishing accounts for over 28 percent of total gross income, and constitutes the major income source for 23 percent of the sample (incomeshare from fishing
≥ 50 %
). Fishers tend to sell their catches at the landing sites to local traders who transport it to local markets, where it may also be bought by local or other traders that market further afield.The diversification effect through the combination of different activities in a household specific portfolio has been analyzed by applying portfolio theory (Objective 2). The stochastic distributions of crop yields over time show that rice is dominating sorghum and millet by first‐order stochastic dominance with an average yield level of 1712kgy‐1. However, the variation in yields is also highest for rice with a standard deviation from the time‐mean of 650kgy‐1. Considering price fluctuations, production analysis reveals that the total value of production is highest for rice, followed by sorghum, millet and fishing.
In general, portfolio analysis suggests that the allocation of labor between possible activities is depending on efficiency considerations and hence follow a rational behavior.
Results show that rice growers are less diversified, while fishermen display a relatively high activity diversification (SIDfishermen = 0.82 > SIDrice growers = 0.62). Despite high correlation coefficients between the different activities, the resulting portfolio incomes show the following order by second‐degree stochastic dominance: Fishermen fSorghum growers
fMillet growers fRice growers.
With regard to poverty and vulnerability among the sampled households (Objectives 3.1 and 3.2), both, the asset‐based as well as the LPM approach to VEP yield consistent findings. In general, fishing households are able to generate higher incomes, albeit at the cost of higher variation in income. As a result, fishermen are the least affected by poverty and vulnerability, whether measured at absolute levels (US$1.25 per capita per day) or applying a relative poverty line (50% of time‐mean average household income). Further, results show that fishermen suffer rather from transient poverty (foremost stochastic poverty). To the contrary, households for whom agricultural activities have a higher priority are suffering to a larger extent from chronic poverty, in particular rice and millet growers. Hence, the probability to be poor as well as the extent of poverty (measured as
the expected shortfall) is significantly lower for fishers, compared to other livelihood groups. Considering risk as the expected negative deviation from the time‐mean income confirms these results.
To estimate the effect of possible development interventions, a scenario analysis has been conducted, based on research findings and policy propositions (Objective 3.3). Thus an increase in climate fluctuations is found to have a considerable negative impact on income risk. The standard deviation would for example increase by up to 23%, resulting in significant increases in vulnerability to poverty for all livelihood groups. However, it is also shown that such trend could be counteracted by interventions that particularly aim at a reduction in the covariation structure of income flows from different activities. For example, small‐scale irrigation projects or the introduction of aquacultural enterprises could be able to disconnect specific income flows from the general dependency on climatic variation.