Estrategia agrícola ante variabilidad en precipitaciones: sensibilidad del agricultor de la cuenca del rio del Guayas y Esmeraldas

Abstract

CONDITION FOR PUBLICATION OF PROJECT. Climate variability is enhanced by climate change, generating more sporadic extreme rainfall and longer droughts. Therefore, studying how these climatic processes modify the agricultural production strategy allows us to understand the process of optimizing production plans empirically. The Guayas and Esmeraldas river basins are two territories of high agricultural production. The work studied the process of land use modification and agricultural plant health through spatial panel econometric methods. It was found that agricultural activity below 500 m altitude reduces its vegetation thickness by 25% due to the effect of extreme precipitation. Meanwhile, for agriculture between 500 m and 1500 m altitude, droughts have sustained negative effects of up to 18 months. Similarly, it was possible to differentiate the resilience to water stress for large and small farmers.