Land Constraints and Agricultural Intensification in Ethiopia: A Village-Level Analysis of High-Potential Areas
By Derek Headey, Mekdim Dereje, Jacob Ricker-Gilbert, Anna Josephson, A. Taffesse. 2014
214 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Highland Ethiopia is one of the most densely populated regions of Africa and has long been associated with both Malthusian disasters and Boserupian agricultural intensification. This paper explores the race between these two countervailing forces, with the goal of inform two important policy questions. First, how do rural Ethiopians adapt to land constraints? And second, do land constraints significantly influence welfare outcomes in rural Ethiopia? To answer these questions we use a recent household survey of high-potential areas. We first show that farm sizes are generally very small in the Ethiopian highlands and declining over time, with young rural households facing particularly severe land constraints. We then ask whether smaller and declining farm sizes are inducing agricultural intensification, and if so, how. We find strong evidence in favor of the Boserupian hypothesis that land-constrained villages typically use significantly more purchased input costs per hectare and more family labor, and achieve higher maize and teff yields and higher gross income per hectare. However, although these higher inputs raise gross revenue, we find no substantial impact of greater land constraints on net farm income per hectare once family labor costs are accounted for. Moreover, farm sizes are strongly positively correlated with net farm income, suggesting that land constraints are an important cause of rural poverty. We conclude with some broad policy implications of our results.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b2266a52fb1c8993ea92c2f0099dbfda0874e5a
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- T. Jayne
- Derek Headey
- M. Muyanga
- C. Ragasa
- Jordan Chamberlin
- A. Dorward
- A. Chapoto
- Christopher B. Barrett
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Measurement Error Mechanisms Matter: Agricultural Intensification with Farmer Misperceptions and Misreporting (2019, unknown): “The issue remains far from settled, however, as other recent studies find support for the intensification hypothesis (Pender and Gebremedhin, 2007; Headey et al., 2014; Josephson et al., 2014; Ricker-Gilbert et al., 2014).”
- Adaptation to land constraints: Is Africa different? (2014, background): “The last of these claims is somewhat speculative, but we do know that higher density areas rely more on perennial staples like cassava, bananas and enset, in addition to traditional cash crops such as coffee and tea (Headey et al., 2014; Jayne and Muyanga, 2013).”
- The Effect of Land Access on Youth Employment and Migration Decisions: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia (2018, unknown): “This relationship can be quite complex in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), depending on land and labor constraints (Headey et al. 2014).”