Effects of carbon dioxide emissions on agricultural production indexes in East African community countries: Pooled mean group and fixed effect approaches

The ongoing climate change threat brought by the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the atmosphere has rekindled global activism to address its detrimental effects on agricultural production with the maximum tenacity. The current study, consequently, examines the causal effect between CO2 emissions and agricultural production indexes while controlling for renewable energy consumption, arable land and governance, using data spanning from 1996 to 2019. The study applied pooled mean group/Autoregressive distributed lag and fixed effect approaches and tested for the causality between the variable of interest using the Dumitrescu and Hurlin Granger non-causality test. The long-run equation shows that CO2 emissions, renewable energy consumption, labour force and arable land size have positive effects on the crop production index. Whereas, renewable energy consumption, labour force, arable land size and governance positively affect the livestock production index. While no causality exists between CO2 emissions and crop production index. However, the effects of governance and the size of arable land on agricultural production remained inconclusive. To achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger for their people, East African Community countries need to commercialize agricultural production and embrace more eco-friendly farming techniques.