The Impacts of Disasters on African Agriculture: New Evidence from Micro-Data

Disasters affect millions of people each year and cause economic losses worth many billions of dollars globally. Reporting on disaster impacts in research, policy, and news primarily relies on macro statistics based on disaster inventories. The macro statistics suggest that a relatively small share of disaster damages accrues in Africa. This paper, instead, uses detailed survey micro-data from six African countries to quantify disaster damages in one key sector: crop agriculture. The micro-data reveals much higher damages and more people affected than the macro statistics would indicate. On average, 36 percent of the agricultural plots in the sample suffer crop losses due to adverse climatic events. In the countries and time period analyzed, these losses reduced total crop production by an average of 29 percent. Importantly, many of these losses are underreported or undetected in key disaster inventories and therefore elude macro statistics. In the case of droughts and floods, the economic losses recorded in the micro-data are $5.1 billion higher than in the macro statistics, affecting 145 million to 170 million people, more than four times as many as the macro statistics suggest. The difference stems mostly from smaller and less severe but frequent adverse events that are not recorded in disaster inventories.