The relationship between environmental degradation, agricultural crops, and livestock production in Somalia

Climate change is an imminent threat to both developing and developed countries. Various determinants of climate change have been discovered in the literature including, inter alia, the agriculture sector. To this end, this study models the role of agricultural crops — maize, sesame, sorghum, and wheat productions — and livestock production in environmental degradation in Somalia for the period of 1985 to 2017. The study applied the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) for the long-run cointegration between the variables, and vector error correction modeling (VECM) for short- and long-run causalities among the variables. The empirical result revealed the presence of a long-run cointegration between environmental degradation, agricultural crops, and livestock production. All the crops and livestock production increase environmental degradation except wheat production which has a constructive role in reducing environmental degradation in the long run. In contrast, the VECM results detected a short-run causality from sorghum to livestock production. Environmental degradation, sesame, sorghum, and wheat productions cause maize production significantly in the short run as well as in the long run. Moreover, sesame production causes sorghum production in the short run. Likewise, a long-run causality is established from environmental degradation, maize, sesame, livestock, and wheat production to sorghum production. However, Somalia policymakers should institute agricultural policies that are not only sustainable for agricultural production practices to meet the growing food demand but also sustainable to the environment.