Suchergebnisse

"This paper examines the impact of cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals, using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia. We review the involvement of cooperatives, in terms of who participates and where they are located. We then use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to assume that the decision of where to establish a cooperative is largely driven by external considerations, and is thus exogenous to the members themselves justifying the use of propensity-score matching in order to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives. Four conclusions are derived from the analysis. First, despite the spread of cooperatives – they existed in less than 15 percent of districts in 1994 and nearly 35 percent in 2005 – there are important disparities across regions. Within regions, cooperatives tend to be located in areas that already have better access to markets and lower exposure to price and environmental risks. Second, at the household level participation is only 9 percent, with poorer households less likely to participate. Third, while cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members, they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold by their members. Fourth, these average results hide considerable heterogeneity in the impact across households. In particular, we find smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketable surplus as a result of higher prices, while the opposite is true for larger farmers." -- from Authors' Abstract ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; Theme 11; Subtheme 11.1 ; MTID; DSGD

Ethiopia is one of the most populous countries in Africa with the agricultural sector playing an important role in the country. It is estimated that in 2011 the agricultural sector contributed about 45 percent to gross domestic product (GDP). More important, it is a major source of employment in the country, with almost 80 percent of the population making a livelihood in the sector (World Bank 2014a). Understanding the complex linkages in agriculture, and identifying opportuntities and challenges to improve its performance, is therefore fundamental. Moreover, while Ethiopia has made important strides in the reduction of poverty and the improvement of food security over the past decades, poverty and food insecurity levels remain high. At the forefront, government policies and stakeholders have made enormous efforts to improve the functioning of the agricultural sector and of staple food sectors in particular, along with attempts to understand what policies and investments are likely to have the most impact. ; PR ; IFPRI1; ESSP; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

By any measure, teff is an important crop in Ethiopia. It is estimated that one-fifth of all land under cultivation in the country, approximately 2.7 million hectares, is used to grow teff. However, while teff has been grown and consumed in Ethiopia for centuries, relatively little is known about the economics of teff production and the postfarm teff value chain that supplies this staple to millions. This is set to change with more time and effort being devoted to building the value chains surrounding its production, marketing, and consumption in various ways. People in government, agriculture, health, research, and other areas are becoming more aware that by increasing teff productivity through research, application, and training, this drive could turn around the lives of many poor people in rural communities. ; PR ; IFPRI1; ESSP; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

The study assesses factors that explain households' perceived tenure insecurity and the demand for new formalization of land rights in Ethiopia. We use data from the 2013 Agricultural Growth Program (AGP) survey of 7,500 households from high agricultural potential areas of Ethiopia. The results from a logistic estimation and a descriptive analysis reveal that the de-mand for further land demarcation is positively associated with higher perception of tenure insecurity. Moreover, disaggre-gated regression results indicate that ownership and boundary-related disputes characterize peri-urban locations and vibrant communities, whereas perceived risk of government expropriation of land is mainly manifested in predominantly rural com-munities and areas where administrative land redistribution is a recent practices. Hence, the rollout strategy for the recent wave of the Second-Level Land Certification agenda should avoid a blanket approach, as it can only be considered a best fit for those vibrant and peri-urban locations where demand for further formalization is higher and boundary and ownership-related disputes are more common. However, focusing similar interventions in predominantly agrarian communities and communities with recent administrative land distributions may not be advisable since expropriation risk seems to be dictating perceived tenure insecurity of households in such locations. Rather, regulatory reforms in the form of strengthening the depth of rights over land, such as formalization of rural land lease markets and abolishing conditional restrictions on inter-generational land transfers via inheritance or gifting, could be considered as alternative and cost-effective intervention pack-ages in this latter context. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI2; ESSP ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

The COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to disrupt food value chains in Ethiopia and elsewhere, impacting the livelihoods of farmers and the diets of rural and urban households. These effects are likely to hit the poorest and most vulnerable farmers and consumers the hardest, but they are not yet well understood. More evidence is needed to guide the government and other organizations in devising responses. While not representative of the whole value chain, our interviews with vegetable production stakeholders have a number of potential policy implications. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; ESSP; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Improved technologies are increasingly promoted to farmers in sub-Saharan-African countries to address low agricultural productivity in their staple crops. There is, however, a lack of evidence on how adoption affects farmers' labor use and profitability at the farm level, as well as the importance gender roles play, all essential drivers for the successful up-scaling of the use of the improved technologies. This paper analyses the labor and profitability impact of the recently introduced row planting technology in teff production in Ethiopia. Based on agronomic evidence in experimental settings, the Government of Ethiopia has focused extension efforts on promoting the widespread uptake of row planting to address low teff yields, replacing the traditional broadcasting method of plant teff. Using an innovative Randomized Controlled Trial set-up, we show that the implementation of row planting at the farm level significantly increases total labor use, but not teff yields, relative to broadcast planting, resulting in a substantial drop in labor productivity when adopting row planting. Moreover, the implementation of row planting has important consequences for inter- and intra-household labor allocation, with relatively more use of non-family labor. The adoption of row planting was further found not to be profitable for farmers in the first year of the promotion campaign, seemingly explaining the limited success in up-scaling the adoption of the technology by farmers in the second year of the program. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI2; CRP2; ESSP; DCA; A Ensuring Sustainable food production; D Transforming Agriculture; G Cross-cutting gender theme ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)