Climate Variability Related Impacts on Market Gardening Crop Production in Buea Urban Area, Cameroon: Inquiry and Policy Implications towards Urban Food Security

Climatic variability is a significant environmental factor affecting agriculture, particularly market gardening crop production in the Buea Urban Area. To investigate climate variability related impacts on market gardening crop production and propose policy implications, our study corroborates climatic data on scalar quantities (rainfall and temperature) of climatic variability and annual estimated yields in tons of 3 market gardening crops (tomato, pepper and leafy vegetables) for 12 years (2004-2015), complemented by reviewing relevant published sources. Bivariate associations between the two variables were done using the Pearson’s Correlation coefficient, verified at a 0.05 level of significance. Microsoft Excel 2016 and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 were used to analyse the data, presented in graphs and a table. Findings showed that variability in rainfall and temperatures are precursors to the prevalence of insect pests and diseases decreasing market gardening crop production. There was a negative relationship between mean annual temperature and pest and disease effect on all three market gardening crops, though not to the same extent (-0.19, -0.182 and -0.248 respectively). A significant negative associations between rainfall and two of the market gardening crops; pepper (r = -0.622) and leafy vegetables (r = -0.646) was observed, while that of tomato was found to be negative but not statistically significant (r = -0.544). Policy implications of the results warrant the promotion of adaptive strategies such as crop diversification and multi-cropping system and the adoption of technological innovation by the market gardeners through the use of certified seed varieties that are more resistant to climatic variability and insect pests and diseases in order to ensure sustainability of market gardening crop production and long term urban food security.