RISK IMPLICATIONS OF FERTILIZER USE ON RAINFED BARLEY

Date

1992

Author

Somel, Kutlu
MAZID, Ahmed
EL-HAJJ, Khazaa

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

32
views

10
downloads

Cite This

In West Asia and North Africa, barley is grown mostly in the lower rainfall areas where it has a comparative biological advantage over other traditional cereals. In these areas, barley is produced with a minimum input technology. The growing demand for barley as the main source of feed is forcing the limits of the natural resource base and production is turning into a mining operation. Due to the high degree of uncertainty, caused primarily by the variability of rainfall between and within seasons, fertilizer use on barley has been considered risky by both farmers and policy makers. This study aims to assess the effects of environmental factors on barley yields at different levels of fertilizer. A unique data set comprised of on-farm fertilizer trials in Syria provides evidence that there are options among the fertilizer treatments which exhibit lower or no higher sensitivity to environmental factors while having higher yields as compared to the case where no fertilizer is used. These treatments would be attractive to farmers and a rigorous extension effort complemented by changes in policy, in particular relaxing the fertilizer allocation restrictions to drier areas, will have desirable effects.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/110580

Collections

Department of Economics, Article