This paper examines the effects of climate change and farmers’ adaptation strategies on food crop yields in Togo over the period 1996–2025. Agriculture remains predominantly rain-fed and highly vulnerable to climate variability, making food production increasingly exposed to rising temperatures, irregular rainfall, and extreme weather events. While existing studies have mainly focused on temperature and precipitation, fewer have jointly considered broader climatic variables and farmers’ endogenous adaptation responses at a disaggregated territorial level. Using a balanced panel dataset covering 33 prefectures and seven major food crops (corn, sorghum, rice, yam, cassava, beans, and peanuts), this study combines agricultural production statistics with meteorological data from national databases. The empirical analysis applies the Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) method to address heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependence. Beyond temperature and precipitation, the model incorporates evapotranspiration, relative humidity, sunshine duration, and wind speed. Adaptation strategies are proxied by substitution and marginal agricultural lands to capture land reallocation decisions. The results reveal significant nonlinear relationships between climatic variables and crop yields. Extreme temperatures, excessive rainfall, and high evapotranspiration exert predominantly negative effects on productivity, although sorghum shows greater resilience to thermal stress. In contrast, corn, cassava, and beans are particularly vulnerable to heat and rainfall irregularities. Furthermore, land-based adaptation strategies do not improve productivity; marginal and substitution lands are associated with declining yields, suggesting that farmers expand cultivation onto less fertile lands as a coping mechanism rather than a productivity-enhancing strategy. The originality of this study lies in integrating extended climatic variables and endogenous land-use strategies into a prefectural panel framework. However, the analysis is limited by the lack of farm-level data and direct measures of technological adaptation. The findings support stronger policies promoting irrigation, climate-smart agriculture, improved seed varieties, and institutional support to enhance long-term food security.

Climate change, Food crop yields, adaptation strategies, Togo

agronomy

Presentation: poster