Climate Shocks, Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from colonial Tropical Africa

A rapidly growing body of research examines how weather variability, anomalies and shocks influence economic and societal outcomes. This study investigates the effects of weather shocks on African smallholder farmers in British colonial Africa and intervenes in the debate on the mediating effect of cash crops on resilience to shocks. We employ a dual research strategy, involving both qualitative and econometric analysis. We analyse original primary evidence retrieved from annual administrative records and construct a panel dataset of 151 districts across West, South-central and East Africa in the Interwar Era (1920-1939). Our findings are twofold. First, we qualitatively expose a range of mechanisms leading from drought and excessive rainfall to harvest failure, social tension and distress. We then test the link econometrically and find a robust and significant U-shaped relation between rainfall deviation and social tension and distress, proxied by annual imprisonment. Second, we review a long-standing and unsettled debate on the impact of cash crop cultivation on smallholders’ resilience to climatic shocks and find that cash crop districts experienced lower levels of social tension and distress in years of anomalous rainfall.