Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to reveal factors to introduce or raise livestock by farmers to respond to external shocks such as rapid economic growth with globalization and extreme weather events. Risk behaviors of farmers, social networks, and credit constraints are considered the main factors in this chapter. The target research area is the northern part of Vietnam around the Red River Delta. The villagers have a traditional home garden system, the so-called VAC, comprising trees for fruit, ponds for aquaculture, and livestock with high resilience. Because of the intrusion of the market economy, the traditional system is collapsing, although livestock can be considered a method to make smooth consumption in response to shocks. This chapter indicates that farmers in the targeted communities are coping with the intrusion of the market economy as an external shock. Raising livestock to generate a profit in the market has gained greater focus. Larger inputs for livestock may have caused environmental degradation and must be examined. Raising livestock is one of the major methods to enhance the resilience of households through smoothing consumption. However, it is probably causing other unexpected problems in the area because of the loss of the stability of the traditional VAC system.
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Notes
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- 2.
Liquidity among those assets is different. Sure, holding high liquidity assets is critical for the households to respond to external shocks. Liquidity of assets for agricultural production is not so high in some cases. Moreover, values of those assets tend to be decreased because of external shocks affecting the area overall, including extreme weather event. Under those circumstances, consumption smoothing by using those assets is not workable. Farmers encountering external shocks prefer to hold livestock rather than to sell the livestock in many sub-Saharan African countries (Fafchamps et al. 1998, Hoddinott 2006 and Kurosaki 2009).
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These data and the following data related to paddies and livestock were obtained from several institutions through field surveys.
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The data in Fig. 3.1 are from a questionnaire survey. Findings mentioned are justified from interviews with experts such as government officials.
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Matsuda, H., Ogata, Y., Takagi, A., Kurokura, H. (2018). Farmers’ Behavior for Introducing Livestock to Respond to External Shocks. In: Takeuchi, K., Saito, O., Matsuda, H., Mohan, G. (eds) Resilient Asia. Science for Sustainable Societies. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56597-0_3
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