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Abstract
Tajikistan is judged to be highly vulnerable to risk, including food insecurity risks and climate
change risks. By some vulnerability measures it is the most vulnerable among all 28 countries in the
World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region – ECA (World Bank 2009). The rural population,
with its relatively high incidence of poverty, is particularly vulnerable. The Pilot Program for
Climate Resilience (PPCR) in Tajikistan (2011) provided an opportunity to conduct a farm-level
survey with the objective of assessing various dimensions of rural population’s vulnerability to risk
and their perception of constraints to farming operations and livelihoods. The survey should be
accordingly referred to as the 2011 PPCR survey.
The rural population in Tajikistan is highly agrarian, with about 50% of family income deriving
from agriculture (see Figure 4.1; also LSMS 2007 – own calculations). Tajikistan’s agriculture
basically consists of two groups of producers: small household plots – the successors of Soviet
“private agriculture” – and dehkan (or “peasant”) farms – new family farming structures that began
to be created under relevant legislation passed after 1992 (Lerman and Sedik, 2008). The household
plots manage 20% of arable land and produce 65% of gross agricultural output (GAO). Dehkan
farms manage 65% of arable land and produce close to 30% of GAO. The remaining 15% of arable
land is held in agricultural enterprises – the rapidly shrinking sector of corporate farms that
succeeded the Soviet kolkhozes and sovkhozes and today produces less than 10% of GAO (TajStat
2011)
The survey conducted in May 2011 focused on dehkan farms, as budgetary constraints precluded the
inclusion of household plots. A total of 142 dehkan farms were surveyed in face-to-face interviews.
They were sampled from 17 districts across all four regions – Sughd, Khatlon, RRP, and GBAO.
The districts were selected so as to represent different agro-climatic zones, different vulnerability
zones (based on the World Bank (2011) vulnerability assessment), and different food-insecurity
zones (based on WFP/IPC assessments). Within each district, 3-4 jamoats were chosen at random
and 2-3 farms were selected in each jamoat from lists provided by jamoat administration so as to
maximize the variability by farm characteristics. The sample design by region/district is presented in
Table A, which also shows the agro-climatic zone and the food security phase for each district. The
sample districts are superimposed on a map of food security phases based on IPC April 2011.