The farmer in the of Tanzania and the farmer in the southern Australain developing
Drought face similar decisions as to whether to the hazard area and what the will do in the event of continuing shortage. Like other individua s who knowingly expose themselves to anatural hazard, they make some kind of appraisal of the prospectthat drought will continue. They canvass a number of the possible actions to be taken in dealing with the threatening environment. Each thinks about the consequences to himself and his family of taking those actions. Finally, they choose in one way or another
what, if anything, they will do.
One farmer may plant a "catch" crop to try again for at least a modicum yield. The other may quietly sit it out. As outlined in Chapter 2, they can do many things, and they can decide to do none. It is this process of individual choice that is at the base of much of the action of people in dealing with extreme natural events. The invasion of Char Jabbar by peasants is triggered by
government's decision to protect the coast, but the actual movement is an aggregation of individual decisions. The decision of the Wilkes-Barre ätizens to remain in their homes after the flood re-ceded is reflected in a public program, but it is at root a summation of family actions.
The land behind Baghdad, like the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, gives mute testimony of failure to survive in places of hazard. The density
of settlement amid poverty in northeast Brazil, as in the GangesBrahmaputra delta, testifies to survival without prosperity. With regard to the less chronic or less cataclysmic events, why is it that people appear at times to seek less than the best for them-
selves, to take unnecessary risks, to be ignorant of serious consequences, or to seem remarkably foolish in a hindsight view of their
personal history?If it Were known precisely why people select some information and ignore other information, much social behavior could be explained. For example, risk-taking by residents on the seismically active San Andreas fault zone in Califo nia is often dismissed with facile generalizations. Residents of the ault zone are branded sim-ply as greedy or stupid or shortsighted. Their actions are then explained or forecast in similarly simplistic terms. These appraisals come easy, are applied readily to public solutions, and are usually misleading. They rarely have predictive power; more complicated answers must be sought.For an understanding of how choices are made, it would be helpful to have a detailed theory of individual decision processes.But, as indicated in Chapter 2, no satisfactory model is yet availableto illuminate the behavior of the Bengal fisherman or of a Tanzanian or Australian farmer. Lacking that, we can develop a rough model of bounded rationality to review what is known and to outline relations that SHII are speculative.
HOW DO PEOPLE CHOOSE ADJUSTMENTS?
The significance of the choice process and the difficulties of probing it are illustrated by two men of the land who face drought. One is in an area just beginning to undergo modernization in a semiarid section of Tanzania. The other makes use of highly refined agricultural technology in growing wheat and wool in southern Australia.
HAMISI JUMA
Juma lives on the southeast slopes of the western Usambara Mountains. Rising from about 400 meters to 1800 meters in eleva-tion as a small, compact, uplifted block in northeast Tanzania, the Usambaras are densely populated by Shambala-speaking people. On very steep slopes of up to 45 degrees, some terraced, Juma attempts to support a household of six persons. He cultivates 2 hectares of land in five separate plots planted primarily in maize, beans, and cassava. The family food supply is supplemented by bananas grown in moist gullies. Since he is far from more affluent centers, Juma has few opportunities for cash crops. His present
mainstay is the spice cardamom.
Compared to that of neighbors farming higher up the slope, the moisture available to Juma is moderate at best and highly seasonal. Average rainfall is somewhere around 850 millimeters, spread over a usable season (where rainfall is greater than one-half the poten-tial evapotranspiration) of five months. It comes partly in November/December and lags in January/February; the greatest amounts are available in March, April, and May.
when interviewed, Juma is eager to talk about drought. The previous cultivation year (1969—70) had been a harsh one; the outcome of the then current year (1970—71) was still uncertain. At the age of 41, he recalls two other droughts besides the most recent one, and estimates that three years out of ten were bad ones for him and his family. When asked what he does about droughts, he readily explains different actions. In addition to prayer, these in-dude increased planting of cassava (a crop with low moisture requirements and high storage potential in the ground), planting sweet potatoes in swampy ground, and stoppin