Tenure security, resource poverty, public programs, and household plot-level conservation investments in the highlands of northern Ethiopia

Land degradation poses a serious problem for the livelihoods of rural producers. Furthermore, there is rarely enough private investment taking place to commensurate the scale of the problem. This article examines the role of tenure insecurity, resource poverty, risk and time preferences, and community‐led land conservation on differentiated patterns of household investment in land conservation in northern Ethiopia. We control for biophysical, household characteristics, market access conditions, and village level factors. Investments in soil bunds and stone terraces are specifically studied so as to capture the link between these various factors and the durability of conservation investments. We introduce the distinction between the determinants of the decision to invest and how much to invest in conservation. Regression results show that publicly led conservation programs seem to significantly stimulate private investment. A host of plot‐level variables and household perceptions of returns on conservation investments, expressed in terms of perceived improvements in land quality and increased crop yields, were found to be critical to the decision to invest and intensify soil conservation. The evidence on the significance of households' attitudes toward risk aversion suggests the important role of risk and the household's risk‐bearing capacity in the decision to intensify conservation measures. At the same time, tenure security indicators and households' resource endowments (resource poverty) had weaker effects in increasing willingness to invest and the level of investment made. The policy implications of these results point to the importance of agricultural research and extension efforts that target technologies which reduce household risk and poverty while enabling sustainable investments in conservation measures by individual households.     

Land titling policy and soil conservation in the northern uplands of Vietnam

In Vietnam, a quasi-private property regime has been established in 1993 with the issuance of exchangeable and mortgageable long-term land use right certificates. Using primary qualitative and quantitative data collected in a mountainous district of Northern Vietnam, this paper investigates the role of the land policy in the adoption of soil conservation technologies by farmers. This issue is of crucial importance in the region where population growth and growing market demands have induced farmers to intensify agricultural production. While poverty has been reduced, environmental problems such as soil erosion, landslides, and declining soil fertility have become more severe over the past years. Our findings suggest that despite farmers’ awareness of erosion, soil conservation technologies are perceived as being economically unattractive; therefore, most upland farmers continue to practice the prevailing erosion-prone cultivation system. Focusing on agroforestry as one major soil conservation option, we estimate household and plot-level econometric models to empirically assess the determinants of adoption. We find that the possession of a formal land title positively influences adoption, but that the threat of land reallocations in villages discourages adoption by creating uncertainty and tenure insecurity. The analyses reveal that these two effects interact with each other but are of small magnitude. We conclude that the issuance of land titles is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to encouraging the adoption of soil conservation practices. However, current practices remain economically unattractive to farmers. This deficiency needs to be addressed by interdisciplinary research and complemented by strong efforts by local authorities to promote sustainable land use.     

A model of shifting cultivation: can soil conservation reduce deforestation?

Shifting cultivators manage soil not only by adjusting soil use on already‐cleared lands, as in continuous cultivation, but also by clearing forests to obtain new fertile soils. This study examines the crucial link between on‐farm soil conservation and deforestation in shifting cultivation by modeling forest clearing as an investment in soil for a private farmer. More generally, by doing so the study attempts to integrate deforestation and soil conservation models which have been separately developed in the literature. Our policy goal is to arrest tropical deforestation—as destruction of global commons—caused by land degradation in shifting cultivation while improving the well‐being of poor shifting cultivators. Our integrated approach enables joint policy analyses of deforestation and land degradation. Three welfare‐enhancing policies are considered. The first is agricultural and nonagricultural subsidies affecting farm and nonfarm income opportunities. The second is fiscal and tenure policies affecting discount rates. Our question is whether the link between forest clearing and soil fertility alters the outcomes of these two standard macroeconomic policies commonly found in the literature. The third policy (or program) is various soil conservation measures affecting soil regeneration and erosivity on already‐cleared lands. This article examines a very important question which has received little attention in previous theoretical works: can soil conservation reduce deforestation? This study confirms anti‐deforestation effects of the promotion of nonfarming activities—a common and often emphasized finding in previous works—among shifting cultivators. More importantly, it also demonstrates that improving various soil conservation measures not only discourages forest clearing among shifting cultivators but also tends to have greater effects on forest protection than promoting nonfarming activities. Contrarily, agricultural price subsidy or technological progress gives rise to the opposite outcome, and lowering the farmer's discount rate or improving tenure security encourages him/her to clear more forests just to accumulate soil.     

The impact of soil conservation and output diversification on farm income in Central American hillside farming

This article analyzes the determinants of farm income among hillside farmers participating in natural resource management projects in El Salvador and Honduras. The farm income function was evaluated using a system of equations in which income is determined simultaneously by the farmer's decision to adopt soil conservation technologies and by the level of diversification (number of agricultural activities) on the farm. The database used comes from surveys administered to 678 beneficiaries of these projects during 2002. The econometric results suggest that all the variables related directly to land use (i.e., output diversification, soil conservation practices and structures, and the adoption of forestry systems) have a positive and statistically significant association with farm income. Also, farmers who own land enjoy higher farm incomes than those who do not. The results indicate that when investing in natural resource management projects, governments and multilateral development agencies should pay close attention to output diversification, land tenure, and human capital formation as effective instruments in increasing farm income.     

Estimating returns to soil conservation adoption in the northern Ethiopian highlands

Land degradation in the form of soil erosion and nutrient depletion presents a threat to food security and sustainability of agricultural production in many developing countries. Governments and development agencies have invested substantial resources to promote soil conservation practices as part of an effort to improve environmental conditions and reduce poverty. However, limited rigorous empirical work has been done on the economics of soil conservation technology adoption. This article investigates the impact of stone bunds on value of crop production per hectare in low and high rainfall areas of the Ethiopian highlands using cross-sectional data from more than 900 households, with multiple plots per household. We have used modified random effects models, stochastic dominance analysis (SDA), and matching methods to ensure robustness. The parametric regression and SDA estimates are based on matched observations obtained from the nearest neighbor matching using propensity score estimates. This is important, because conventional regression and SDA estimates are obtained without ensuring that there actually exist comparable conserved and nonconserved plots on the distribution of covariates. We use matching methods, random effects, and Mundlak's approach to control selection and endogeneity bias that may arise due to correlation of unobserved heterogeneity and observed explanatory variables.
We find that the three methods tell a consistent story. Plots with stone bunds are more productive than those without such technologies in semi-arid areas but not in higher rainfall areas, apparently because the moisture conserving benefits of this technology are more beneficial in drier areas. This implies that the performance of stone bunds varies by agro-ecology type, suggesting the need for designing and implementing appropriate site-specific technologies.     

Tenants’ land access in the rental market: evidence from northern Ethiopia

The purpose of this study is to investigate the allocation efficiency in the tenancy market, and thereby the potential of the market to facilitate operational farm size adjustment that can help land‐poor tenant households to transform into smallholder commercial farms. We analyzed three rounds of balanced panel data for the production seasons 2005–2006, 2009–2010, and 2014–2015 collected from 320 smallholder farms in Tigrai region in northern Ethiopia. Random effects dynamic probit and tobit models are used to assess how land‐poor tenants’ access and extent of access to land are affected by state dependency (earlier participation in the market), kinship ties, climate shocks, and legal restrictions. The results indicate that state dependency and kinship ties with the landholder had strong positive effects on participation and intensity of participation. Climate shocks significantly affected the intensity of participation of tenants already in the rental market. Tenants’ overall access to rented land had not improved from 2005–2006 to 2014–2015. The amount of land accessed by those already in the market was insufficient for them to become commercial farmers. The important policy implication is that orchestrated interventions at community level are needed to reduce transaction costs and thereby improve land access of entrepreneurial tenants.     

Determinants of food security in Southern Ethiopia at the household level

In the early 1980s, a paradigm shift occurred in the field of food security, following Amartya Sens (1981) claims that food insecurity is more of a demand concern, affecting the poor's access to food, than a supply concern, affecting availability of food at the national level. Despite the wide acceptance of Sen's thinking, many controversies including the relative importance of supply‐side versus demand‐side variables in causing and solving food insecurity have remained in academic and policy circles. This study develops a recursive household food security model within the framework of consumer demand and production theories following Singh et al. (1986) , and parses out the relative importance of supply‐side versus demand‐side variables in determining household food security in southern Ethiopia. Based on results of a test of full/reduced model and the magnitude of changes in conditional probabilities of food security, we conclude that the supply‐side variables are more powerful determinants of food security than the demand‐side variables.     

Farmer-to-farmer technology diffusion and yield variation among adopters: the case of improved cowpea in northern Nigeria

This article examines the magnitude and sources of yield variation among adopters of improved cowpea varieties in northern Nigeria promoted through farmer‐to‐farmer diffusion. The results reveal important efficiency differences between the lead farmers who have contacts with breeders and the follower farmers who get technology and information from the lead farmers. Differential adoption of the package of seed, insecticide, fertilizer, and recommended cereal‐cowpea cropping pattern provides much of the explanation for yield variation among adopters. The component often missing, and hence accounting for much of the yield variation, is the crop management technology relating to the cereal‐cowpea cropping pattern. No efficiency variation is attributed to the source of technology and information, such as whether improved cowpea was obtained from breeders or lead farmers. Technology source has a rather indirect influence on efficiency through its effect on package adoption where breeders promote greater package adoption among the lead farmers than the lead farmers do among the follower farmers. Possible ways of disseminating crop management technological information through the farmer‐to‐farmer technology diffusion are recommended to better exploit the yield and profitability potentials of improved cowpea varieties in northern Nigeria.     

Farmer management of production risk on degraded lands: the role of wheat variety diversity in the Tigray region, Ethiopia

This article investigates the effects of wheat genetic diversity and land degradation on risk and agricultural productivity in less favored production environments of a developing agricultural economy. Drawing production data from a household survey conducted in the highlands of Ethiopia, we estimate a stochastic production function to evaluate the effects of variety richness, land degradation, and their interaction on the mean and the variance of wheat yield. Ethiopia is a center of diversity for durum wheat and farmers manage complex variety mixtures on multiple plots. Econometric evidence shows that variety richness increases farm productivity. Variety richness also reduces yield variability but only for high levels of genetic diversity. Simulations with estimated parameters illustrate how planting more diverse durum wheat varieties on multiple plots contribute to improving farmer's welfare.     

Agrobiodiversity conservation under an imperfect seed system:the role of Community Seed Banking schemes

The study is an empirical investigation of agrobiodiversity conservation decisions of small farmers in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The primary objective is to measure the effectiveness of Community Seed Banking (CSB) in enhancing diversity while providing productivity incentives. Our results indicate a significant impact of participation in CSB on farm‐level agrobiodiversity. However, the level of biodiversity conservation was not found to have the expected reinforcing impact on participation, indicating no support for simultaneity. CSB participation also led to an increase in productivity, consistent with a need for such incentives in order to enhance diversity at a farm level. Our assessment of the performance of the GLS estimator yielded a significant discrepancy between the GLS and bootstrap estimates. This led to the conclusion that bootstrapping asymptotic estimations might be required for appropriate inference.     

Technical and scale efficiency of crop and livestock farms in Poland: does specialization matter?

The technical and scale efficiency of Polish farms is analyzed using data envelopment analysis. Efficiency differences are measured according to farm specialization, in crop or livestock, at two points in time during transition, 1996 and 2000. The efficiency results are reviewed in light of confidence intervals provided by bootstrapping. Livestock farms are found to be, on average, more technically and scale efficient than crop farms. Scale efficiency is high for both specializations. Technical inefficiency appears mostly to be due to “pure technical” rather than “scale” inefficiency, and thus attributable to inefficient management practices. The evidence suggests that the low‐educational attainment of people engaged in agriculture is one important reason for these inefficient practices. In 2000, 64% of livestock farms and 86% of crop farms were operating under increasing returns to scale. Improvements in the land lease legislation and changes to the policy support to farmers' pensions could stimulate the land market and remove the incentives to keep a fragmented operational structure.     

Supply response in Ethiopia: accounting for technical inefficiency

Few empirical studies of supply response using the profit function have accounted for technical inefficiency. Using farm‐level panel data from Ethiopia, this study examines the effect of incorporating technical inefficiency in estimating the supply response of peasant farmers. Two systems of output supply and input demand equations are estimated and compared: the conventional model in which technical efficiency is assumed and another in which technical inefficiency is explicitly incorporated. The model with technical inefficiency is preferred on grounds of theoretical consistency and improved estimates, although model comparison tests are not conclusive. Incorporation of inefficiency generally increases the magnitudes and the statistical significance of own price elasticities, substantially so in the case of fertilizer and fertilizer‐intensive crops, and alters the priority attached to nonprice factors. An important result is that only the specification with inefficiency reveals a significant effect of access to extension services on output. Only this specification finds that output increases with household size, which one expects as the farms in the sample are largely subsistence and producing for own consumption. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that farmers' response to incentives is considerably restricted by inefficiency, suggesting that the traditional model would overstate response by excluding the efficiency variable.     

Modeling linkages between climate policy and land use: an overview

Agriculture and forestry play an important role in emitting and storing greenhouse gases. For an efficient and cost-effective climate policy, it is therefore important to include land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) explicitly in economy-climate models. This article gives an overview and assessment of existing approaches to include LULUCF into partial and general equilibrium economy-climate models. For each class of models, we describe different examples, their treatment of land, and their potential for and applicability to policy analysis, as well as their shortcomings. We identify data requirements and conceptual problems, and provide suggestions for future research.     

The role of education on the adoption of chemical fertiliser under different socioeconomic environments in Ethiopia

Studies on input adoption consider education as one of the most important factors that affect adoption decisions. However, very little is known about the spill‐over effect of intra‐household education on the adoption process and about the impact of education on adoption decisions under different socioeconomic conditions. We investigate these two issues using a discrete choice model. The results indicate that the decision making process is a decentralised one in which educated adult members of the household actively participate in the decision making process. This casts doubt on the traditional assumption that the household head is the sole decision maker. The results reveal that there is a substantial and statistically significant intra‐household spill‐over effect of education on the adoption decision of households. The results of the study also show that the coefficient of the education and the environment interaction variable is negative and statistically significant. This demonstrates that education and socioeconomic environments could be substitutes in modern environments and complementary in traditional ones. This implies that the expansion of education in traditional areas may be more attractive than in modern areas since education is usually the only means to enhance the ability of farmers to acquire, synthesise and respond to innovations such as chemical fertiliser.     

Measuring soil quality dynamics A role for economists, and implications for economic analysis

Measuring soil quality is extremely difficult, yet it has clear economic importance. In particular, there is a great deal of empirical interest in the dynamics of soil quality evolution when land managers respond to policies and other incentives. Yet current methodologies for measuring changes in agricultural land quality are largely static and rely heavily either on incomplete measures such as proxy variables, or ad hoc indexes of selected soil characteristics. Moreover, much empirical work relies on static econometric techniques or simulation models. In this paper, we develop a means to infer soil quality changes from input and output data using a dynamic production function model. Using data from field experiments, we estimate the model in a way that allows the recovery of a dynamic measure of soil quality whose evolution depends on variations in management practices. Our methodology and findings will help provide firmer empirical foundations for analyses of the economic implications of land degradation and the soil quality implications of agricultural policies.     

Enhancing food security in South Sudan: the role of markets and regional trade

South Sudan faces serious problems of food insecurity due to low levels of domestic food production, periodic droughts, widespread poverty, and since late 2013, renewed armed conflict. This article explores market price behavior using cointegration analysis and estimates the effects of production and trade shocks through multimarket model simulations. We show that market prices in the capital city, Juba, of both maize and sorghum are cointegrated with import parity prices of these cereals sourced from Uganda, consistent with observed trade flows. Model simulations, using econometrically estimated demand parameters, suggest that private sector imports of maize and wheat would greatly mitigate the potential fall in consumption in the case of a decline in domestic cereal production. Other simulations indicate that if total imports of cereals are reduced by one‐third (still more than two times the levels of food aid in 2013) because of disruptions to private market flows, domestic prices of cereals could rise by 45% or more. The article concludes that whatever measures are taken involving national food security reserves, it is crucial that government policy serves to maintain incentives for private sector imports to avoid destabilizing market supplies, domestic prices, and ultimately, food consumption of the poor.     

Soil quality and fertilizer use rates among smallholder farmers in western Kenya

Studies of fertilizer use in sub-Saharan Africa have been dominated by analyses of economic and market factors having to do with infrastructure, institutions, and incentives that prevent or foster increased fertilizer demand, largely ignoring how soil fertility status conditions farmer demand for fertilizer. We apply a switching regression model to data from 260 farm households in western Kenya in order to allow for the possibility of discontinuities in fertilizer demand based on a soil carbon content (SCC) threshold. We find that the usual factors reflecting liquidity and quasi-fixed inputs are important on high-SCC plots but not on those with poorer soils. External inputs become less effective on soils with low SCC, hence the discernible shift in behaviors across soil quality regimes. For many farmers, improved fertilizer market conditions alone may be insufficient to stimulate increased fertilizer use without complementary improvements in the biophysical conditions that affect conditional factor demand.     

Determinants and impact of sustainable land management (SLM) investments: A systems evaluation in the Blue Nile Basin,Ethiopia

Ongoing debate over water management along the Blue Nile and land degradation in Ethiopia emphasizes the need for efficiency gains in agricultural production through sustainable land management (SLM). However, previous SLM studies overlook the tradeoffs involved in maintaining SLM investments over time. We address this limitation by combining a household survey that evaluates the economic impacts of SLM investments and maintenance, with a hydrological model that explores location‐specific infrastructure effects. We then use a multi‐market model to evaluate the impacts of alternative SLM investments on agricultural production, prices, and incomes over time. Analysis suggests SLM investments must be maintained for at least seven years to show significant increases in value of production, and that terraces on moderate and steep slopes are most effective in increasing agricultural yields. However, the benefits of terracing do not outweigh the cost of foregone off‐farm labor opportunities, nor compensate for lower agricultural prices from increased supply. Thus, SLM investments must be paired with other input and infrastructure investments, as well as subsidies for initial labor costs, in order to incentivize adoption and long‐term SLM maintenance.