Farmer technology adoption in Cambodia: The impact of climate change, risk aversion, and crop type

Abstract

Farmers face challenges ranging from fractured landholdings to climate change, yet they often have limited adoption of technology that could help cope with these adversities. As such, understanding farmers’ adoption of technology is critical to developing farmer livelihoods in the context of changing global pressures. This research studies the technology and behavior change decisions of farmers in Cambodia through a survey of 109 farmers growing different types of crops and that have a variety of technical change opportunities. The study uses double hurdle modeling with a fractional logistic regression approach and discusses the results in the context of the theory of planned behavior. Results demonstrate that growing rice or cashews, extension services, risk aversion, indebtedness, experiencing crop loss, and having negative perspectives about climate change were positively significantly related to production behavior change while age and owning livestock were negatively significantly related to behavior change. The results suggest that agricultural technology could be made more accessible regardless of production type and developed with special attention towards climate change effect mitigation strategies.