Estimation of Wheat Yield Response under different Economic, Location and Climatic Conditions in Punjab

Abstract

The knowledge of supply response greatly helps in farm decisions in allocation of resources in right direction. It can help planners and policy makers to allocate and achieve production targets and in long term planning. It thus provides a framework for adjusting production to the optimum resource employment to promote economic development. The study of supply response at disaggregated level is imperative as responses may be different for different agro-ecological zones of Pakistan. Therefore, the concern of this thesis was to examine the impact of different factors on the supply of agricultural commodities in different agro-ecological zones in Punjab in order to make necessary adjustments in the policy reforms. This study was carried out to estimate the wheat yield response function. The explanatory variables were economic, location and climatic variables. The proxy variable for economic variable was input change, for location variable it was area change and for climatic variables these were temperature and rainfall. Time trend variable was used to capture the affect of technological advances and improved farm management practices. Time series data on these variables was collected from secondary sources for the period 1979-2009. Mixed and cotton-wheat zone of Punjab were selected for the analysis and Faisalabad and Bahawalpur were selected from the above two zones respectively, mainly because of their major share in production of wheat. Dummy variable test and F-test results showed that data pooling was appropriate, so data from the two districts was pooled and used as a single entity. Then method of Ordinary Least Square was used to draw the wheat yield response function. The effect of climatic variables was found significantly higher than that of non-climatic variables i.e., economic and location variables. The largest impact was of mean maximum average temperature at the time of maturity, ceteris paribus with one oC in its increase the average wheat yield increases by 1.4 mounds per hectare. It was concluded from the economic variable results that the level of input use was less than optimum. The location variables suggest that increasing the area virtually decreases the yield. Vertical expansion was found to be the solution of Pakistan’s growing food security needs. Horizontal expansion will result in further decline in the productivity of wheat. The recommendations from this research study were that there should be timely availability of inputs, provision of adequate finance to ensure optimal input use and creating awareness among farming community about the benefits from using recommended package of inputs. There will be growing need of developing new wheat varieties which should be more adaptable to changing climatic conditions