Sustainable agriculture and environmental preservation are important topics in research on development in Third World settings at present. It is important that this research be informed by longitudinal studies of agroclimatological change which document change, explain the processes and events leading to change, and consider the consequences of change in the lives of people living in developing societies. Longitudinal studies of change in agricultural regions of developing countries are uncommon. This project offers a unique opportunity to revisit a region in East Africa that was studied twenty years ago. The Tanga Region of Tanzania lies along a climatic transect where rainfall distribution changes from two seasons in the northeast to one season in the southwest. This situation presents interesting and potentially significant questions of agricultural potential and management. The research will analyze climatological data, crop productivity, and agricultural risk in this area of great climatic variability and uncertainty. A random sample of farmers will be interviewed about their agricultural practices, management decisions, and social behavior, and these data will be compared to those collected in the same region two decades earlier. These data will be used to assess changes in the effects of rainfall variation, moisture stress in crops, crop yields, and management interventions on agricultural practices. The objective will be to enhance the ability to predict which practices will produce different crop yields under conditions of environmental uncertainty. This research should provide basic knowledge about whether and how agricultural practices have changed over the twenty year interval since the original survey. It will also improve our understanding of the relationship between climate variation over space and time and its effect on agricultural management practices. These insights will be helpful in formulating agricultural policy which attempts to foster sustainable development practices in sensitive agricultural areas of developing nations.
