The effect of environmental variations on the production of the principal agricultural products in Colombia

The agricultural sector of Colombia supports the national economy and food security due to the rich lands for cultivation. Although Colombia has a vast hydrological basin, climate change can impact agricultural productivity, generating economic and social adverse effects. For this, we evaluated the impact of some environmental variables on the production of the most sold crops using production, climatic, and hydrological data of the 1121 municipalities from 2007 to 2020. We modeled the production of coffee, rice, palm oil, sugarcane, and corn, adopting a Bayesian spatio-temporal model that involved a set of environmental variables: average temperature, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, evapotranspiration, precipitation, runoff, soil moisture, vapor pressure, radiation, and wind speed. We found that increases in the average temperatures can affect coffee (-0.2% per °C), rice (-3.76% per °C), and sugarcane (-0.19% per °C) production, meanwhile, these increases can boost palm oil (+2.55% per °C) and corn (+1.28% per °C) production in Colombia. This statement implies that the agricultural sector needs to substitute land use, promoting the production of palm oil and corn. Although our results did not find a significant effect of hydrological variables in any crop, suggesting that the abundance of water in Colombia might balance the impact of these variables. The increases in vapor pressure impact all the crops negatively (between -11.2% to -0.43% per kPa), except rice, evidencing that dry air conditions affect agricultural production. Colombia must manage the production location of the traditional products and implement agro-industrial technologies to avoid the climate change impact on crops.