Agricultural transitions from subsistence to export-oriented production make households more reliant on volatile agricultural commodity markets and can increase households’ exposure to crop price and yield shocks. At the same time, subsistence farming is also highly vulnerable to crop failures. In this work, we define household livelihood vulnerability as the probability of falling under an income threshold. We propose the use of a Bayesian network (BN) to calculate the income distribution based on household and community-level variables. BNs reflect relationships of dependence between variables and represent all variables as probability distributions, which allows for the explicit propagation of variability and uncertainty between variables. We focus on two agricultural frontier case study areas (CSAs) in northern Lao PDR that are at different stages in the transition from subsistence to export-oriented agriculture. Because agricultural production is the main livelihood activity in both CSAs, we develop a BN that calculates the probability distribution of net household agricultural production income. BN structure and parameterization are based on data collected in 110 household surveys across both CSAs, as well as interviews with villagers, government officials, and private sector actors. We analyze the effect of crop price and yield variability, land-use portfolio, and land holdings, on the probability of having a negative net agricultural income, which reflects a household’s ability to meet its food consumption needs through cash crop sales. Results show that agricultural income is highly sensitive to rubber plantation area, rubber yield, and rubber price given the very large income potential of the crop. Households with larger agricultural areas have a lower probability of falling under an agricultural income threshold regardless of their diversification choices. Households that own more high-value cash crops are more buffered against rice yield shocks despite having higher agricultural income variability. However, low-income households are better off if they maintain a minimum level of rice sufficiency in combination with high-value cash crop production. Diversifying upland cash crops by increasing the share of cardamom (a low-value but low-volatility crop) at the expense of rubber (a highly lucrative crop with high price volatility) does not have a sizable beneficial impact, because returns from cardamom are significantly lower than for rubber. We show that BNs can be useful tools for the design and evaluation of rural development policies.

中文翻译：

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使用贝叶斯网络评估生计脆弱性：老挝北部的案例研究

农业从维持生计向以出口为导向的生产过渡，使家庭更加依赖于动荡的农产品市场，并可能增加家庭对作物价格和单产冲击的风险。同时，自给农业也极易遭受作物歉收。在这项工作中，我们将家庭生计的脆弱性定义为低于收入阈值的可能性。我们建议使用贝叶斯网络（BN）来基于家庭和社区级别的变量来计算收入分配。BN反映变量之间的依存关系，并将所有变量表示为概率分布，这允许变量之间的可变性和不确定性明确传播。我们着眼于老挝北部的两个农业前沿案例研究区（CSA），它们处于从维持生计农业到以出口为导向的农业过渡的不同阶段。由于农业生产是两个CSA中的主要生计活动，因此我们开发了一个BN，用于计算家庭农业净收入的概率分布。国债的结构和参数化基于在两个CSA中进行的110次家庭调查中收集的数据，以及对村民，政府官员和私营部门参与者的访谈。我们分析了农作物价格和产量变化，土地利用组合和土地持有量对农业净负收入的可能性的影响，这反映了一个家庭通过经济作物销售来满足其粮食消费需求的能力。结果表明，鉴于农作物的巨大收入潜力，农业收入对橡胶种植面积，橡胶产量和橡胶价格高度敏感。农业面积较大的家庭，无论其多样化选择如何，都有低于农业收入阈值的可能性较低。尽管农业收入的波动性较高，拥有更多高价值经济作物的家庭对水稻产量冲击的缓冲更大。但是，低收入家庭如果保持最低水平的水稻充足并结合高价值的经济作物生产，他们的境况就会更好。通过增加小豆蔻（低价值但低波动性作物）的份额而以橡胶（高利润，高价格波动性作物）为代价来使陆地经济作物多样化，不会产生可观的收益，因为豆蔻果实的回报明显低于橡胶。我们表明，国民银行可以成为设计和评估农村发展政策的有用工具。