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MOGADISHU, 10 November 2026 — Somalia’s agricultural debate often begins with a familiar question: will the rains arrive? A new study suggests that question is incomplete.
Even a favourable growing season may produce disappointing returns when insecurity interrupts transport, markets fail to reward farmers, or costs rise. Agricultural investment requires looking beyond harvest volumes to what producers earn after expenses.
Published in Cogent Food & Agriculture in July 2026, the study, Climate Risk, Conflict, and Crop Profitability in Somalia: Implications for Agrifood Investment (2000–2025), was conducted by Mohamud Hussein Mohamud and Bile Yusuf Abukar of SIMAD University’s Faculty of Economics. It examines these pressures together rather than as separate problems.
The researchers assess maize, sorghum, cowpea, sesame, rice, banana, and lime over 2000–2025. Their dataset contains 182 crop-year observations: seven crops tracked annually for 26 years.
Drawing on agricultural statistics, climate records, conflict-event data, and price information, they construct a profitability index based on revenues after production costs, relative to those costs. This measures investment performance rather than yields alone.
The analysis combines two econometric approaches. A Bayesian vector autoregression model examines how profitability responds over time to earlier outcomes, rainfall variation, conflict, and prices.
A panel autoregressive distributed lag model investigates shorter-term movements alongside longer-term relationships, including cultivated area and agricultural cost inflation. Farmers need both immediate resilience and sustainable returns.
The most intuitive finding concerns rainfall. Across the seven crops, more favourable rainfall anomalies are associated with higher profitability.
In the Bayesian model, the reported coefficient is 0.130; the complementary model also finds a positive relationship over both short and longer horizons. For rain-fed farming, this reinforces the value of irrigation and climate forecasts.
Yet this finding does not mean more rain is always better. The study measures annual departures from historical rainfall patterns, not the full consequences of flooding, timing, soil conditions, or the distribution of rain within a growing season.
An investment policy built on its findings must therefore address both drought and excessive rainfall. Water management matters more than simply hoping for wetter years.
Conflict emerges as the other decisive constraint. Both models associate greater conflict intensity with lower crop profitability.
The study identifies familiar channels: disrupted cultivation, unsafe roads, limited access to markets, damaged infrastructure, and uncertainty that discourages investment. These disruptions change the economics of producing and selling food, even on productive land.
This is arguably the paper’s strongest policy message. Agricultural security cannot be reduced to guarding farms alone. It includes dependable transport corridors, predictable access to trading centres, and local arrangements that protect producers and reduce disputes over land and resources. A farmer cannot realise a profitable harvest if moving it to market becomes prohibitively expensive or dangerous.
The study also finds positive associations between profitability and both international commodity prices and domestic market prices. Higher selling prices can improve producers’ returns when they reach the farm gate and exceed the accompanying costs.
But this result should not be confused with a recommendation to make food expensive. Consumers and producers experience price increases differently, while traders, transport costs, and market access determine how much of a price gain farmers actually retain.
Cultivated area also shows a positive association with profitability, supporting investment in productive capacity. Agricultural consumer price inflation has a negative estimated effect, but its reported significance is weaker: the short- and long-run estimates do not cross the conventional 5% statistical threshold.
The sensible conclusion is that production costs warrant attention, not that this particular analysis establishes their effect with the same confidence as conflict or rainfall.
The crop-level chart adds an important warning against one-size-fits-all planning. Banana, maize, and sesame frequently perform above the sample average, while cowpea and lime show greater variability and more periods of weaker returns. Rice and other crops experience their own peaks. These trajectories favour crop-specific strategies, though the models do not establish separate causal effects for each crop.
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The paper deserves credit for using difficult data and reporting diagnostic checks. It also identifies limitations openly. Historical farm-level profit records are incomplete, so profitability is reconstructed from available revenue and cost data.
Conflict is measured through aggregated annual events, which may obscure profound differences between farming districts. The combined sample is informative, but still limited for decisions about particular locations, seasons, or individual farms.
One technical issue merits clarification. The study defines its profitability index as revenue minus cost, divided by cost, and reports an average value of 1.24. Under that definition, 1.24 represents net returns equivalent to 124% of costs, rather than a small margin above break-even.
The paper’s accompanying description of that average as a modest positive return therefore needs explanation. This does not erase the reported relationships, but precise interpretation is essential when findings inform investment forecasts.
Another striking result is the estimated error-correction coefficient of −0.610. The authors interpret this as approximately 61% of a short-run departure from the model’s long-run equilibrium being corrected within a year. It is a statistical adjustment parameter, not evidence that 61% of struggling farmers recover financially within twelve months.
More broadly, relationships found in historical observational data should not automatically be read as proof that any single policy intervention will cause a given increase in profit.
The authors recommend climate-adaptation finance, water harvesting, drought-tolerant seeds, secure agricultural growth zones, improved storage and feeder roads, market-information systems, and greater access to productive technology.
These proposals broadly match the risks identified. However, implementing them should begin with carefully evaluated pilots, transparent costs, and attention to farmers who may be excluded by insecure tenure, weak bargaining power, or limited access to credit.
For policymakers, the case is for coordinating agriculture, security, infrastructure, and commerce rather than designing isolated programmes. For investors, it is for assessing conflict exposure and supply-chain reliability alongside soil quality and potential yields.
For researchers, the next step is more geographically detailed, farm-level evidence that tests which interventions actually improve income, not simply which variables move together in national statistics.
The study reframes agricultural potential as an economic and institutional question. Somalia has crops worth investing in, but profitability is neither guaranteed by fertile land nor delivered by favourable rainfall alone.
It depends on whether farmers can produce safely, manage uncertainty, reach functioning markets, and retain a fair return. That is the challenge this research places before Somalia’s agricultural policymakers and investors.
About the Study Researchers:
Research reviewed: Mohamud Hussein Mohamud and Bile Yusuf Abukar (2026), Climate Risk, Conflict, and Crop Profitability in Somalia: Implications for Agrifood Investment (2000–2025), Cogent Food & Agriculture, 12(1).