Evidences and Implications of Socioeconomic Factors Influencing Soil Reclamation Measures

Abstract

Soil quality can be thought of as a stock of capital which affect the livelihood of rural population through agricultural practices as farmland offers food and income. Soil degradation is responsible for converting fertile agricultural lands into unproductive barren lands reducing productivity causing economic loss to the farmer and food insecurity. Soil alkalinity is one such major form of degradation and causes up to 84.10 per cent of yield loss depending on intensity. In this context a study has been conducted to assess the farmer’s response to various exogenous factors as well as socio-economic situation towards maintain or augmenting stock of soil quality. For the study, Manikandam block is selected purposively as 24 per cent of the cultivated area is degraded out of which 64.80 per cent of the land degradation is due to alkalinity. 90 respondents spread over in 5 villages, were randomly selected representing 45 from each stratification namely, farmers adopting reclamation measures in alkaline soil and farmers without adopting reclamation measures in alkaline soil. Prinicipal Component Analysis and Discriminant Analysis were employed to analyse the socio-economic factors influencing adoption of soil reclamation measures to draw suitable policy implication. The results of the above analyses indicate that the institutional factors (0.997) have positive impact on decision towards reclamation whereas economic factors (-0.394) have negative impact towards reclamation measure and it also suggest the importance of awareness creation through intensified extension system and farmer-centric government policies on soil conservation.

Keywords: Alkalinity, Soil Reclamation, Socio-economic Factors, PCA, DA