Agri Intro Geta

Agricultural and Rural Transformation in
Ethiopia
Obstacles, Triggers and Reform Considerations
Policy Working Paper 01/2020
Getachew Diriba
January 2020
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
ISBN 978-99944-54-72-3
Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Ethiopia Policy Working Paper 01/2020
Table of Contents
1. Introduction………………………………………………………….. 1
2. Challenges of Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Ethiopia…… 2
2.1 A Brief Overview of Ethiopian Agricultural Policies and Programs 2
2.2. Obstacles to Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Ethiopia 5
The Rising Tide of Hunger and Poverty…………………………… 5
Input and Output Price……………………………………………... 8
Constraints…………………………………………………………. 8
Property Right Dilemma…………………………………………… 10
Organizational Inefficiencies and Incoherence…………………….. 13
Fearful of the Creative Destruction………………………………… 14
2.3 The Agriculture and the Environment Nexus……………………. 15
2.4 Agricultural Growth without Transformation……………………. 17
The Crop Sub-sector………………………………………………. 17
The Livestock Sub-sector…………………………………………. 21
3. Framing the Processes of Agricultural and Rural Transformation…... 28
3.1. Conceptualizing Agricultural and Rural Transformation………... 28
3.2 Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Development Literature 32
3.3 Triggers of Agricultural and Rural Transformation………………. 37
4. A Call to Action: Incentives and Reform Considerations…………………. 39
4.1 Quadruple Sector Approach to Transformation…………………. 39
4.2 Sustained and Intergenerational Commitments to Transformation. 42
4.3 Legal and Regulatory Environment to Facilitate Transformation… 44
4.4 Decisive Agricultural Mechanization and Access to Inputs………. 45
4.5 Decisive Private Sector Lead in Agricultural and Rural
Transformation………………………………………………………… 47
4.6 Effective and Accountable Organizational Capacity……………… 48
4.7 Accessible Rural and Agricultural Financial, Credit Services and
Incentives……………………………………………………………… 48
4.8 Environmental Sustainability……………………………………… 49
References…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 51
ii
List of Tables
Table 1: Number of Holders by Land size (ha) - 2014/2015…………… 12
Table 2: Cattle Holding Size in Main Crop Growing Areas by
Region, 2014-2015………………………………………………………. 23
Table 3: Livestock ownership in Pastoral Areas, 2014/2015…………… 24
Table 4: Total Livestock Resources of Ethiopia, 2014/15……………… 25
List of Figures
Figure 1: Emergency and Safety Net Program Beneficiaries:
1978 – 2017……………………………………………………………… 7
Figure 2: Value of Imported Cereals, Dairy Products, Edible Oil
and Cotton, 1993- 2016 (USD) …………………………………………. 7
Figure 3: Selected Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/2018………………... 18
Figure 4 : Selected Pulse Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18…………… 20
Figure 5: Selected Oil Seeds Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18……………… 21
Figure 6: Processes of Agricultural & Rural Transformation: Triggers,
Indicators & Outcomes…………………………………………………… 30
Acronyms
mt – metric ton
ha – hectare
hg – hectogram
MOA – Ministry of Agriculture
SDG – Sustainable Development Goals 2030
USD – United States Dollar
iii
1. Introduction1
We can do anything we want –provided we can find a way. We are

constrained by nothing except our own ignorance. Plagues and droughts
have no cosmic meaning –but we can eradicate them. Wars are not a
necessary evil on the way to a better future –but we can make peace. No
paradise awaits us after death –but we can create paradise here on earth
and live in it for ever, if we just manage to overcome some technical
difficulties.
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, 2015: 200
This discussion paper assesses the state of agricultural and rural

conditions of Ethiopia; describes the extent, speed and depth of agricultural and
rural transformation; and provides policy options for the relevant parties. It is
premised on the progress Ethiopia has registered in social, economic and
infrastructural development, as well as on policy experimentation over past
decades. On average, Ethiopia’s economy has been growing at 10% per annum
over the past decade. Progress has also been made in expanding rural and urban
roads, from 19,000 km of roads in 1990 to 121,171 km in 2019.Ethiopia has also
registered a gross educational enrollment ratio of 27.55 million in 2015/16 of
which 1.32 million (some 4.8%) graduate each year expecting to join the labor
force (MOE 2016). The number of students in various levels of educational
establishments is very large, and it is equivalent to, for example, the entire
population of Madagascar, or the combined population of Togo, Sierra Leone,
Libya and Swaziland. Notwithstanding the continuing need to enhance quality of
education, this is a great success story of educational expansion. The vast
expansion, however, represents massive demand for jobs across all sectors of the
economy.
During the past decades, in aggregate, poverty has declined, in monetary
terms, from 45.5% in 1995/96 to 23.5% in 2015/16. By contrast, the multi-
dimensional poverty index2 remains at 83.5% with intensity of deprivation at
58.5%, according to the 2019 Human Development report. The share of food in
household expenditure has fallen from 60% in 1995/96 to 55% in 2015/16 (the
National Planning and Development Commission 2018). The Ministry of
1
The discussion paper is abridged from the author’s book: Overcoming Agricultural and Food
Crises in Ethiopia: Institutional Evolution and the Path to Agricultural Transformation. The
first edition was published in 2018 at the Master Printing, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and
Amazon, USA 2018. The second edition will be published later this year.
2 The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) identifies multiple deprivations at the household
and individual level in health, education and standard of living
1
Agriculture reports3 that agriculture contributes 27.5 billion dollars or 34.1% to

the GDP, employs some 79% of the population, accounts for 79% of foreign
earnings, and is the major sources of raw material and capital for investment and
market. Furthermore, the Ministry plans to increase wheat productivity from
2.7mt/ha in 2019 to 4 mt/ha by 2023 and reduce wheat import from 1.7 million
mt in 2019 to zero by 2023. The MOA envisages achieving this by acid soil and
vertisol management, intensification, expanded use of irrigation, mechanization,
and private sector partnership.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s population is estimated at 113.56 million
accounting for 1.47% of the world population; it now ranks number 12 in the list
of countries by population, according to an online Worldometers world
population data. The population under the age of 29 years accounts for 69% or 76
million people with median age of 18.8 years, and 23.2 million people (21.1%)
urban population. It is expected to increase by 1.9% per year reaching 136 million
people in 2030. During the same period, the economy is forecast to grow, on
average, by around 7%.
2. Challenges of Agricultural and Rural Transformation in

Ethiopia
2.1. A Brief Overview of Ethiopian Agricultural Policies and
Programs
Ethiopia’s agricultural modernization was conceived at the turn of the
th
20 century by Emperor Menelik II (1889-1913) who had had a voracious
appetite for modernization: he initiated modern housing, eucalyptus tree planting
to mitigate urban firewood demand, introduced irrigation, built a railway system,
and established key ministries including the Ministry of Agriculture. Emperor
Haile Selassie I (1930-1974) expanded Menelik’s vision of modernization but
both emperors were hindered by the lack of organizational, human and other
capacities (see Diriba, 2018). It was only from 1960 onwards that modest progress
was recorded following the establishment of agricultural high schools and
colleges with the support of USAID’s Point 4 Program. Subsequently, a series of
bilateral and multilateral technical assistance plans were offered to develop
agriculture, including the creation of a Comprehensive Agricultural Package
Program, the establishment of an Extension Program Implementation Department
(EPID) within the Ministry of Agriculture, and other packages. The most
ambitious plan to transform Ethiopian agriculture was drawn up in 1967 by
3
MOA 2019: Transforming Ethiopian Agriculture: Power Point Presentation, Briefing for
Agricultural Scholar Consultative Forum, April 2019, Addis Ababa.
2
USAID contracted through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)4. Completed in

1969, the SRI study consisted of eight program areas for transformation;
unfortunately, it ran into difficulties over tenure constraints and the ensuing 1974
revolution in Ethiopia.
The revolution and the military government which brought an end to the
imperial administration launched a turbulent period (1974-1991) in Ethiopia’s
contemporary political and economic history. The most consequential action,
from the agricultural perspective, was the nationalization of rural lands, ending
one of the oldest feudal systems in Africa, if not the world. Overall, however,
other policies of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE), the Derg
regime as it is usually referred to, induced massive poverty and hunger throughout
Ethiopia (Diriba, 2018).
The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
(EPRDF)5,established itself as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
(FDRE), came to power in May 1991 and with the peasantry as its principal
political ally, it expressly gave priority to the peasant sector of the economy. This
was evidenced in the November 1991 Ethiopia’s Economic Policy for the
Transition Period (EPRD, 1991); the 2001 rolling framework to guide Ethiopia’s
development plan, the Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI)
policy; and the subsequent Five-year Development plans. These have included:
Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP) 2001-2005,
inspired by the multilateral Poverty Reduction Strategy spearheaded by the World
Bank; the Program for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty
(PASDEP) 2006 to 2010 ; and the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP)I (2011
– 2015) and GTP II (2016-2020).
During the initial period and subsequently from 1991 through 2010, the
FDRE focused on poverty reduction. It achieved a significant drop in the rate of
poverty and the number of hungry (CDRC, 2019). In 2011, the EPRDF articulated
its first five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), and in December 2010
it established the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to support
agricultural transformation.
4
The eight program areas were: Program 1 - Farm inputs and agricultural production
consisting of farm machinery, feed; Program 2 - Agricultural Package programs; Program 3 –
Supplemental irrigation for agricultural production; Program 4 – Agricultural credit; Program
5 – Processing agricultural products; Program 6 – Marketing and export program; Program 7
– Improving agricultural techniques and technology; and Program 8 – Manpower resources
for agricultural development including skilled manpower needs, manpower supply and type
of training. See http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNAAK861.pdf
5
As this is being prepared, the coalition front has been formed into a single Prosperity Party
consisting of three of the four original coalition members as well as extending membership to
five other regional parties; the TPLF, the principal founder of the coalition, opted out of the
Prosperity Party.
3
According to the Government’s self-assessment of the GTP I

performance, “Ethiopia has registered rapid, broad-based and inclusive economic
growth that has led to substantial decline in monetary poverty, the proportion of
the population living below the national poverty line fell from 38.7% in 2003/4
to 23.4 percent by 2014/2015; real GDP growth rate averaged 10.1 percent, and
the share of agriculture and allied activities in the overall GDP declined to nearly
39% by the end of 2014/15. Crop and livestock subsectors accounted for 27.4%
and 7.9% of GDP respectively, while the residual was accounted for by forestry
and fishing6.”The Government self-assessment concluded that “the decline in the
share of agriculture is an indication of structural shift from agriculture to
industry and service sectors” (author’s emphasis). As noted earlier, the multi-
dimensional poverty index reveals a different and often-depressing condition of
Ethiopia’s population.
Contrary to the Government’s declared ‘structural shift’, Ethiopian
agriculture has remained essentially antique and rainfall-dependent, an all-too-
obvious reality throughout the country. Rural Ethiopia, a definition that covers
the vast majority of the population, is still typified by lack of roads, services, and
with only 59.5% population, primarily urban, with access to electricity and even
that only intermittent, and 95% of the rural population relying on firewood for
cooking, heating and lighting. There is no evidence of agricultural transformation,
nor has there been evidence of sizeable expansion in the manufacturing sector
commensurate with the vision of the ADLI. By the end of the GTPI, the
government recognized that despite the progress made in a number of sectoral
areas, one fourth of the population still lived below the poverty line, that is in
monetary measure; urban and rural unemployment remained very high, and the
agricultural sector remained dependent on rainfall using traditional methods with
minimal application of modern agricultural inputs. In an after-thought, the
government admitted that ‘there has been limitation in terms of structural
change’. In effect, there had been no structural change at all.
The GTP II period (2016-2020) has coincided with a turbulent political
period, starting after the May 2015 election and continuing to the present time
with political turmoil displacing large segments of the population. As a result of
changes in the ruling coalition, the EPRDF government leadership, and the
launching of extensive reform processes, GTP II performance is expected to be
below expectation. Government estimates suggest that GDP growth rates for
2018 would be around 7% with further reduction in growth in all sectors. The
expectations for agriculture’s growth have been lowered to 4.1%, though the
long-term growth rate is far below this.
6
See GTP II introduction section which assesses GTP I performance.
4
The EPRDF government has also experimented with a number of policies

and programs, expanding organizational outreach to the rural population, and, as
we will see, has been able to register quantitative crop production increases,
especially in cereal crop production and productivity. The categorization of
chronically food insecure population into a Productive Safety Net Program
(PSNP) has created a formalized welfare assistance program, but this requires
continued international assistance that the prevailing Ethiopian economy cannot
sustain without foreign aid. Despite these modest efforts, Ethiopia has not
managed to start any multi-sectoral structural transformation nor has it been able
to put agriculture on the path of transformation.
2.2. Obstacles to Agricultural and Rural Transformation in

Ethiopia
Ethiopia’s agriculture has shown remarkable resilience over many
centuries but is now increasingly failing. This was demonstrated by the
remarkable way it has sustained a steadily increasing Ethiopian population with
millennia-old tools and systems of production. Ethiopia is one of the original
centers for crop and livestock domestication that started during the Neolithic
revolution ten thousand years ago. Since then, Ethiopian farmers have continued
to utilize their ancient system of production despite changing ecological and
population pressures, feeding, if with difficulty, Ethiopia’s growing population
into the 21stcentury with their generationally acquired wisdom and skills. Equally,
Ethiopian agriculture is increasingly failing as farmers work to expand
agricultural lands at a great cost to the environment and the delicate ecological
system, thereby risking the very fabric of their own livelihood. Systemic obstacles
to agricultural and rural transformation in Ethiopia can be summarized as lack of
sustained and intergenerational commitments to transformation, constitutional
and legal constraints, government crowding out the private sector leadership, lack
of mechanization options and constrained input supply system, lack of effective
and accountable organizational capacity, lack of agricultural and rural financial
and credit facilities and environmental degradation (see Figure 6, Box
1).Ethiopia’s institutions have refused to recognize the devastating impact of
technologically-lagging agriculture despite awareness of the 4thindustrial
revolution that would have relieved pressure on the land and offered a respite
from the numerous dimensions of food insecurity.
The Rising Tide of Hunger and Poverty

It is almost unbelievable that policymakers, scholars and practitioners,
with knowledge about the most advanced technologies in the world, failed to
anticipate the problems of food security and agricultural development before they
5
unfolded. They failed to recognize the seriousness of the danger even when the
problems had actually revealed themselves; and they failed to take decisive and
bold action after the problems appeared at national level, along with human,
environmental, economic and political consequences. It demonstrated a real crisis
of vision, a total failure of understanding, naïvely assuming Ethiopia’s agriculture
could continue essentially in its present form and shape.
To be fair, and as briefly introduced above, Ethiopia has been tinkering
with the concept of agricultural and economy-wide ‘modernization’ since the turn
of the 20th century with limited success. Since 2000, efforts have been made to
develop infrastructural expansion - roads, educational facilities, housing
construction in major urban centers, hydro-electric generation plants, modest
expansion in manufacturing and service industries – though the emphasis has
been concentrated in Addis Ababa, the federal capital, and a few other regional
State capitals. Efforts to develop agriculture have also brought about a modest
quantitative growth, especially in cereal crop productivity per unit area. These
efforts have resulted in nearly two decades of 10% GDP growth, and the reduction
of income poverty from 45% in 1995 to 23% in 2018. While this might appear
impressive, the number of poor and food insecure population has remained very
high, with an estimated 25 million people at or below the threshold of survival.
And more specifically, the numbers of people on emergency and safety net
program assistance have been consistently increasing (Figure 1) over the past 40
years, 1978-2017. Not only has the aggregate number of people depending on
welfare assistance increased, there has also been a steady expansion in spatial
manifestations, now covering nearly all the Regional States. This is an underlying
trend that should alarm policymakers and development practitioners alike.
In addition, Ethiopia’s import of cereals (wheat, rice, barley), edible oil
and lint cotton, continues to rise dramatically, now costing over a billion dollars
every year (Figure 2). Given the foreign currency constraints the country is
grappling with, it is disconcerting to witness growing import demands for
products that could easily be home grown.
6
Figure 1: Emergency and Safety Net Program Beneficiaries: 1978 – 2017

20
18
16
Beneficiries, in Millions
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
Source: Author, based on the NDRMC and MOA data.
Figure 2: Value of Imported Cereals, Dairy Products, Edible Oil and Cotton,
1993- 2016 (USD)
2,000
VALUE OF IMPORTS, IN
1,800
1,600
MILLION USD
1,400
1,200
1,000
800
600
400
200
0
1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015
Source: Author, based on the FAOSTAT data.
The paradox is clear. At one level, there is a story that offers successful
production and productivity increases amongst (some) progressive farmers in Arsi,
Bale, part of Showa, parts of Tigray and Somali regional states and other areas. They
have invested their resources to ‘acquire’ agricultural lands, employ tractors and
harvesters, and optimized the use of agricultural inputs. They have succeeded in
7
increasing land and labor productivity. They have successfully improved their lives
and livelihoods. It is, however, a ‘success story’ that demonstrates the potential of
Ethiopian agriculture- if conditions are right. This is no more than a partial ‘success
story’, and represents no more than a tiny proportion of farm households which built
on the historical opportunities of rural development projects of the 1960/70s. At
another level, Ethiopia is desperate to export agricultural commodities to earn foreign
currency that are in critical demand even when some of the export commodities are
not competitive regionally and internationally. Most agricultural commodities are
exported without value addition (for example, sesame seeds or other pulse crops, and
live animals).
Input and Output Price Constraints

Smallholder farmers are faced with input and output price constraints:
imported cereals are sold at subsidized prices to ‘stabilize local grain prices’, and
food aid deliveries dampen local grain prices. Delayed delivery of agricultural
inputs, absence of credit markets, and lack of access to agricultural technology
are the hallmark of Ethiopia’s agriculture in the 21st century.
At the most fundamental level, Ethiopia’s problem has been the way it
has ignored the scientific progress that has provided economic and social
solutions, eased human hardships from want of food, improved and accelerated
transportation, invented tractors and harvesters that have eliminated the need to
depend on the backbreaking antique farming methods and making agriculture
work easier and more enjoyable. The traditional factors of production, land, labor
and capital, have now been merged with the knowledge system. The real
difference between the rich and poor countries is no longer only endowment of
the factors of production as it used to be; rather it is how effectively nations and
people utilize knowledge. Knowledge, that is scientific invention, technology,
innovation, and the internet, are all growing at an accelerated rate leaving far
behind countries such as Ethiopia. As Harari (2015: 212) points out, “the greatest
scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how
little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek
new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. … Inventions
such as the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and the computer have
created whole new industries from scratch. As we look twenty years into the
future, we confidently expect to produce and consume far more in 2036 than we
do today.”
The other side of the story is one of stagnation and decline. The vast
majority of smallholder farmers live in perpetually substandard conditions,
relying on traditional systems, unable to meet food consumption needs and other
demands at the most basic level. Their farms are severely undercapitalized, they
8
work on fragmented and declining landholdings, facing severe and chronic food
insecurity, unable to invest in agricultural inputs (chemical fertilizer, improved
seeds), or withstand seasonal risks of crop failure or animal deaths. They face
continuous poverty and hopelessness. Many are now forced to rely on welfare
assistance and depend on imported cereals (Figures 1 and 2).
The most persistent obstacle to Ethiopia’s agricultural and rural
transformation is insufficient appreciation of the magnitude of the danger or of the
consequences of the steadily increasing problems of agricultural and rural areas (see
Figure 6, Box 1). As already indicated, there has been a total lack of
intergenerational leadership recognizing the limits of the traditional techniques of
farming, the pitiful living conditions of the vast majority of rural populations near
or below subsistence and participating in agricultural practices that lead to extreme
environmental and natural resource degradation. This does not mean that these
problems are unknown - they are after all in the public domain. Numerous studies
have provided detailed analyses of ‘systemic bottlenecks’ in agriculture (see ATA
2014). These have been repeatedly expressed in terms of delayed agricultural input
deliveries, lack of access to agricultural machinery, absence of financial services,
poor agricultural extension systems, incoherent national agricultural research
systems, uncoordinated seed systems, and many other challenges (FAO 1986,
2018, 2019, ATA 2013-2016, Diriba 2018, UNIDO 2013, ILRI 2017, and
numerous other studies and project appraisal reports).
A WIDE7 study reveals changes taking place in rural Ethiopia: “…
increasing divisions and inequalities and disrupted long-standing relationships
between social categories: between the rich and the poor, between those with access
to land and/or capital and those with too little or none, and, in different respects,
between generations and gender. There are also growing disparities between better
connected and less well-connected communities, and between areas and households
within communities that are close or further from roads and urban centers. …. in
much of the country and four bridge communities, the difference between being
landless, having a quarter of half a hectare or more than one and, for the few who are
better off, two hectares or more, can mean the difference being destitute, barely
surviving, managing an independent livelihood or thriving and being part of the
wealthy elites” (Pankhurst and Dom, 2019: 13 - 16).
Ever since the problems of agriculture and rural areas began to become
visible at the national level, Ethiopia’s leaders including relevant players in the
sector appear to have been preoccupied with other issues, making no more than
short-term responses for agricultural development and neglecting any radically
7 WIDE – Wellbeing Illbeing Dynamics in Ethiopia - is an ongoing longitudinal study of 20

rural communities in Ethiopia since the mid-1990s.
9
different possibilities. There has been a recurrent crisis of vision. The issue has
been clear enough: the prevailing systems of agricultural production have
produced numerous fissures and concerns for the environment, for human
wellbeing and for the national economy. It is a commonplace that some 20 million
or more people live in a chronic state of food deprivation at the most basic level;
more than 7.8 million are recipient of permanent welfare assistance under the
Productive Safety Net Program. These figures are steadily increasing both in
number and in area. Every year, another 3 to 5 million people have to be assisted
with emergency humanitarian food aid programs; the numbers that constantly
face risks and vulnerabilities are more numerous than the PSNP and emergency
assisted population combined. The cost of hunger and poverty remains
exceptionally severe for the economy and the population. A Cost of Hunger Study
(AU/WFP/ECA 2013) estimated that hunger cost Ethiopia $2.9 billion USD,
equivalent to 16.5% of GDP. This is expressed in lost productivity, poor
educational performance, healthcare and related expenditures; the environmental
and political costs of hunger, including social unrest, were barely documented in
financial terms. All this has increased in the last six years; and there has to be a
limit to Ethiopia’s costly neglect of agricultural and rural transformation.
Property Right Dilemma

Another critical obstacle to agricultural and rural transformation is legal
and constitutional, that is the prevailing property rights that have produced land
fragmentation, persistently declining land per capita, and an increasingly landless
population. Legally, the constitutionally sanctioned ‘public land ownership’
provides farmers with formidable challenges: land fragmentation, land shortage,
the lack of capacity to capitalize land, and environmental degradation on a
massive scale. Official data on landholding presented in Table 1 shows that 38%
of households access less than 0.5 hectares of land, 23.65% access between 0.51
to 1.0 hectares, 24% between 1 and 2 hectares, and that only the remaining 14%
of households access more than 2 hectares of land. At present productivity levels,
it is only those households which farm more than two hectares of land which can
achieve basic subsistence under normal conditions. Households with less than one
hectare of land are often unable to fulfill household needs including necessary food
consumption at the most basic level. The problem of size is not just the inability to
produce enough crops to meet consumption, it also means it is impossible to save
and create wealth. The persistent decline in the size of farmland also represents a
formidable challenge in applying mechanized farming or of obtaining long-term
capital investment on land.
Ethiopia’s agricultural organizations and multiplicity of actors are
disorganized and incoherent in their approach to the technological challenges.
Political authorities, development practitioners, researchers, technologists,
10
businesses, and entrepreneurs offer no system of coordination and collaboration

to help deal with the massive obstacles facing farmers. Ignoring the conditions
facing the vast majority of Ethiopia’s smallholder farmers is more than merely
reckless; it has serious human, environmental, and political costs.
As Table 1 shows, land shortage is chronic in most parts of the country
with resulting severe degradation of soil and forest resources. In response, the
Ethiopian government encourages famers to employ ‘clustering/ communal
farming’ by adjoining adjacent plots (kuta-getem - ኩታገጠም እርሻ) to help improve
productivity. ‘Clustering farming’ may have an appearance of offering respite;
however, it is impractical, does not resolve the underlying structural and legal
constraints to property rights and the desire to consolidate land, nor does it result
in any decisive increase in income, and or labor productivity frontiers.
11
Table 1: Number of Holders by Land size (ha) - 2014/2015

Regional States < 0.1 0.1 – 0.5 0.51 – 1.0 1.01 – 2.0 2.01 – 5.0 5.01- 10.0 > 10 Total % share
Tigray 61,989 242,870 245,102 256,116 120,235 7,908 1,158 935,378 5.51
Afar 479 4,124 2,683 1,717 416 9,419 0.06
Amhara 315,832 924,145 1,089,212 1,423,634 718,963 35,558 2,033 4,509,377 26.57
Oromia 295,494 1,376,669 1,516,824 1,772,376 1,169,506 143,707 7,483 6,282,059 37.01
Somali 21,695 21,991 27,893 16,525 1,623 89,727 0.53
Benishangul Gumuz 27,008 55,186 46,041 47,057 37,393 5,958 1,172 219,815 1.29
SNNP 595,716 2,477,863 1,067,941 539,482 147,127 9,187 1,681 4,838,997 28.51
Gambela 9,184 20,227 7,399 3,931 1,190 41,931 0.25
Harari 1,328 9,309 8,239 5,167 989 5,032 0.15
Dire Dawa 646 9,033 9,345 3,772 22,796 0.13
Federal 1,307,676 5,141,121 4,014,777 4,081,145 2,212,344 203,941 13,527 16,974,531 100.00
%age 7.70 30.29 23.65 24.04 13.03 1.20 0.08 100.00
Source: Based on CSA data
12
Organizational Inefficiencies and Incoherence

Where there has been some effort to respond to organizational
challenges, in the form of policies or programs, these have repeatedly imposed
taxes and duties, been characterized by input delivery inefficiencies arising from
inaccurate and/or delayed demand estimates and delayed distribution to
households, especially of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. It has all
helped to make prices of agricultural inputs and machinery unaffordable. As of
May 2019, some import duties were being lifted but full benefits of tax
exemptions to smallholders have yet to be realized, especially in absence of rural
and agricultural banks and credit facilities.
Another dimension of any response to organizational challenge has been
the lack of priority access to foreign currencies to import agricultural inputs and
machinery, creating a vicious cycle. The shortages resulting from the lack of
agricultural development have forced the government to import wheat and
vegetable oils to meet deficits in national demand which might otherwise bring
bread riots or a similarly historical troublesome situation. With credits and
financial services limited, and largely inaccessible to the vast majority of the
farming population, the slow pace of agricultural services has retarded
development in agriculture, and indeed in other sectors of the economy,
perpetuating hunger and poverty and risking political unrest.
No formally dedicated organization, public or private sector, has been set
up to supply tractors, harvesters, water drilling machines, agro-processing and
other machinery, suggesting a troubling complacency among all actors about the
traditional system of agricultural production. Despite the activities of the Ministry
of Agriculture, the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) or the Ethiopian
Agricultural Business Corporation (EABC), there is no single organization that is
directly responsible for, or dedicated to, support agricultural mechanization, or
indeed rural transformation. Bizarre as it may sound; Ethiopia seems to have
accepted its traditional system of agricultural production as the best available.
Ethiopia’s leaders and practitioners in agriculture are certainly aware of highly
advanced agricultural technologies. This raises broader political and policy
questions as to why they are not seeking all ways to introduce and support the
adoption of mechanization in agriculture. As we have emphasized, one does not
need an extended statistical analysis nor elaborate data collection to establish that
Ethiopia’s agriculture is very old, relies on ox plow and rain-dependent
techniques and has a negligible rate of mechanization. It is, in fact, an open
museum of the Neolithic age. According to a recent study, the rate of
mechanization in agriculture in Ethiopia is estimated at 0.7% of land prepared by
machine with no more 0.8% crops threshed by machine. Even these are only
13
confined to areas of Arsi, Bale, Western Tigray and parts of Somali region
(IFPRI, 2017)8.
The traditional systems of crop and livestock production may have served
the nation for millennia but this was only with a smaller population and a largely
unaffected environmental system. Today, the same traditional tools and activities
are expected to cultivate extensive areas and feed over 100 million people. This
is not only impractical, but it is also inducing human and environmental disaster.
To continue to rely on the ard plow, or partial application of agricultural inputs,
is simply inadequate to meet expectations of agricultural productivity or
improvements in human condition. As a result of the absence of mechanization,
labor productivity has remained exceptionally low, even in comparison to other
developing economies. At best, household labor productivity, outside coffee or
cash crop growing areas, amounts to 1,750 kg of cereal for cereal-dependent
populations on an average 0.65 ha of land. In addition, youth unemployment has
become a major political and policy challenge for both the Federal Government
and the Regional States. Data on migration is hard to obtain, but it can be inferred
from both pull and push factors at work in Ethiopia. On the one hand, declining
land availability and absence of employment opportunities in rural area are
pushing the youth to urban centers; on the other hand, government authorities,
fearful of political implications, offer ‘promises of job creation’ pulling large
numbers of rural youth into major urban centers, especially Addis Ababa. The
significantly expanded primary, secondary and tertiary education levels are also
creating extensive unmet job expectations outside the agricultural sector and rural
areas. The educational system is not producing or encouraging talent and skills
that help or prepare graduates to create jobs, nor is there sufficient private sector
capacity to employ the tens of thousands of job seekers entering the labor market
each year.
Fearful of the Creative Destruction

There is insufficient appreciation of the potential of a rural and
agricultural transformation to generate employment on a sustainable and
continual basis. This would include mechanized small, medium and large-scale
farmers, tractor and combine harvester operators, rural transport operators,
machinery repair technicians, agricultural extension officers, veterinary
specialists, plant protection specialists, and other service providers. These
services could be linked to rural urbanization, decentralized manufacturing and
services. That is, when agriculture and rural economies are transformed, the role
8http://essp.ifpri.info/2017/02/28/the-rapid-uptake-of-agricultural-mechanization-in-ethiopia-
patterns-implications-and-challenges/, accessed May 2019.
14
of agriculture is elevated, not diminished, taking the commanding role in the

Ethiopian economy and national security. With the transformation of agriculture,
and the factor of productivity being dramatically increased, agriculture would
release surplus labor that would be transferred to agricultural product processing
(such as cotton, oil presses, fruits and vegetable processing, food processing and
packaging, food processing including sucrose extraction and others),
transporting, trading, food catering and distribution (in small shops, hotels,
restaurants, and others), storage, and add value and expanded services at different
stages. For the foreseeable future, on the basis of Ethiopia’s economy today, the
dream of establishing heavy industries (for example, steel smelting or automatic
manufacturing) is likely to be distant. Even if they were realized, agriculture
would still remain the commanding height. A strategic linkage among the
agriculture, manufacturing and service sectors and urbanization would offer
extensive and inclusive development opportunities at scale and at speed. These
actions would, however, require intergenerational political commitment, coherent
policies, balanced investments across all sectors of the economy, and willingness
to accept the forces of creative destruction.
The growing food deficit in the national food balance sheet, the
increasing importation of cereals and vegetable oils, the continued and expanding
food aid flows, the appearance of a chronic food insecure population, with large
segments of the population living below the internationally determined poverty
line, have all been accepted as ‘normal’. Even as the international systems
celebrate the avoidance of ‘famine’, that is absence of ‘mass starvation’ (de Waal
2018), existing conditions signal massive problems for the population, the
environment and the national economy.
Continuation of the present system of agriculture will mean that food and
other needs of the rural and urban poor have to be provided by the government and
international charities. The Ethiopian economy cannot fully finance the number of
the welfare dependent population, nor is feasible to expect indefinite foreign welfare
assistance. Yet, despite all this, at the international level, Ethiopia is committed to
achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which encapsulates “a plan of
action for people, planet and prosperity. …. SDGs recognize that eradicating poverty
in all its forms and dimensions is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable
requirement for sustainable development. …. It is a universal resolve to free the
human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet.
…. The 17 SDGs are integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of
sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental. “United Nations,
the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2015”.
2.3. The Agriculture and the Environment Nexus
The most comprehensive review of the state of Ethiopia’s environment,
its land, vegetation, forests, soils, water, and population was conducted by the
15
FAO and the Ethiopian government in 1986 under the auspices of the Ethiopian
Highlands Reclamation Study. The study, completed more than three decades
ago, concluded that the increase in population had extended farming to
increasingly vulnerable land areas and reduced available fallow periods. In fact,
feudal and other forms of dependent land tenure, coupled with day-to-day
preoccupations with survival, had, over the centuries, led the growing highland
population to farm the land in ways inappropriate to its sustained use. This had
inevitably led to land degradation, typified by excessive deforestation and soil
erosion, and by worsening water storage and flow regimes, and reduced the
potential productivity of land. It had become a spiral of degradation. The study
estimated that over 1900 million tons of soil were lost from the highlands of
Ethiopia annually. These were losses of productive top soil and for all practical
purposes irreversible as it takes many years to generate a ton of top soil. Soil
erosion was gradually undermining the natural agricultural heritage of the
country, and as a result, the highlands of Ethiopia contained one of the largest
areas of ecological degradation in Africa, if not in the world. Environmental
conditions had worsened to such an extent that in some parts of the highlands,
millions were now scarcely able to subsist even in years of good rainfall while
years of poor rainfall threatened famines of increasing severity and extent. Other
highland areas were being gradually degraded, and it was only a question of time
before the degradation spiral threatened livelihoods in all these areas too. This
process of degradation threatened millions of Ethiopians then and even more in
the future. It posed the greatest long-term threat to human survival, and the
greatest challenges facing the Ethiopian people and Government.
These prognoses could hardly have been more apt drawing attention to
urgent action. And since the study was conducted, Ethiopia’s population has
increased 2.6-fold putting massive pressure on the already degraded lands. No
other in-depth study has been conducted, but it is quite evident that the situation
of most watersheds and their surroundings have moved far beyond the picture
painted more than three decades ago. There has been continued expansion of
agriculture into marginal and high-risk areas, seriously increasing land
fragmentation, declining land use per capita and a significant increase in virtual
landlessness. There has, in effect, been no effort to reverse the dangerous trends
observed thirty years ago. Outside of the highland areas, in pastoral and agro-
pastoral areas of the country, an equally dangerous environmental deterioration
is at work. Despite data scarcity, it is evident that crop production has expanded
into the pastoral and agro-pastoral zones creating a perfect storm for
environmental deterioration on the one hand, and conflict between livestock and
crop production on the other.
16
2.4. Agricultural Growth without Transformation

In this section, we will review the performance of the agricultural sector,
cereal crops, pulses, oilseeds and the livestock components.
The Crop Sub-sector

Time series data is used here to examine performance and trends in crop
production. This covers area cultivated, total production and yield per hectare
from 1979/80 through 2017/18, over a period of 38 years. It is important to take
a long-term trend because changes in the national economy such as crop
performance only reveal themselves in time, and long-term data smooths out
short-run fluctuations. During this period, as would be expected, aggregate
national cereal production has increased considerably, by 4.2-fold, reflecting
increases in the number of farming households, expanded area under crop
cultivation, and utilization of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides as
well as other farm management practices. In spite of these quantitative increases,
however, rural life has remained harsh, and production systems have continued
to use antique techniques. Ethiopia’s overall agricultural performance can be
characterized as growth without structural transformation.
During this period, as depicted in Figure 3, the area under cereal crops
grew at a rate of 2.13% per year, while yield increased at a rate of 1.7%, and
cereal production grew by 3.87% per annum. Cereal yields increased from 1,379
kg/ha to 2,617 kg/ha in 2017/18, nearly double the productivity level of 1979/80
(Figure 3). Ethiopia’s cereal productivity of 2,617 kg/ha is far below 7,230 kg/ha
in Egypt and 5,886 kg/ha in China (using FAO production data for 2017),
indicating Ethiopia’s potential opportunity to expand production and productivity
frontiers by more than double or triple its current levels.
The quantitative growth achievements in crop production are due to
national efforts to increase cereal production to ameliorate national and household
food deficits which would otherwise have spun out of control. This growth,
however, came from the expanded area under cultivation, increases in the number
of households participating in agriculture, and the use of chemical fertilizer and
seeds. And any food security and national wellbeing implications of this supply
side growth must also be considered in relation to the five key agriculture
performance indicators: meeting consumption needs, meeting local and social
obligations, investment in agriculture and replacement of tools, capacity to
mitigate risk, and creation of wealth.
17
Figure 3: Selected Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/2018

Cereal Yield/ha Teff Yield/ha
45.0
40.0 Maize
35.0
30.0 Wheat
Quinta/ha
25.0 Maize Maize Wheat

Maize Cereal
20.0 Maize Maize Wheat Cereal
15.0 Wheat Wheat Teff
Wheat Cereal
10.0 Cereal
Teff Teff
5.0 Teff
-
1979/801983/841987/881991/921995/961999/002004/052008/092012/132016/17
Source: Author, based on the CSA data.
Principal cereal crop performance is highlighted below:

Teff: Consists of the largest area cultivated under all cereals, accounting for
29.5% of the total cultivated area and19.7% of total cereal production. This area
allocated to teff production is indicative of the high price of teff which fetches
more than double the price of wheat and many times more for other cereal crops.
It is the national food preference, especially among the middle class, and provides
for the growing export market. The area under teff cultivation has been growing
at a rate of 2% per annum; its total production has been growing at a rate of 3.65%
though yields have only grown at a rate of 1.62% per annum over the past 38
years.
Maize: The area dedicated to maize production is the second largest, 20.8% of
total cereal area with production accounting for 31.4% of total cereal output;
nearly one third of cereal production in Ethiopia is maize. In terms of the volume
of production, maize has the most impact on the national food equation, at least
among the general population. Over the years, the area under maize cultivation
has grown at 2.76% per annum, production by 5.0% and yield by 2.19%.
Sorghum: This accounts for 18.5% area under cereals and 19.3% of total cereal
output. The area under sorghum has grown at an annual rate of 1.71%, total
production at 3.11%, and yield by 1.37% per annum.
Wheat: Accounts for 16.6% of the area under cereal cultivation and 17.3% of
total cereal production. The area for wheat has grown at 3.69% per annual, total
18
wheat production9 at 6.18% and yield has remained at 2.4% per annum during the
same period. Wheat is milled into flour for traditional bread, and use in bakeries,
for pastries and pasta as well as being mixed with other cereals to make enjera.
The growing number of milling companies in and around Addis Ababa, and in
Arsi, Shewa and other regions, is a testimony of the growing demand for wheat.
In addition, a significant quantity of wheat is imported each year to supply the
national shortfall, accounting for 9% of national total cereal production (see
Diriba 2018).
Barley: Accounts for 9.3% of total cereal area and 7.7% of total cereal
production. The area under barley has grown at a rate of 0.57%, total production
by 2.19% and yield by 1.62% per annum.
Pulse Crop Production

Ethiopia has a rich heritage of pulses and oilseeds being one of the centers
of origin of these crops. They represent the most important dietary composition
of households, and are a major contributor to export earnings. Nevertheless,
national policy and program priorities have not been commensurate with the
importance of the pulses and oilseeds domestically or as export earners. Total
pulse crop production grew at 2.75%, area at 1.56% and yields at 1.17% per
annum between 1979/80 to 2017/18 (Figure 4).
Faba beans: Account for 29.8% of area and 33.2% of total pulse production in
2017/18. Annual growth has been 0.89% for area, 1.73% for production and 0.89%
for yield over 38 years.
Haricot beans: Account for 20.8% area and 18.8% of production during the same
period. Growth rate of area has been 7.7%, production at 8.28% and yield at
0.54% since 1979/80, indicating that most of the production increases have been
due to area expansion.
Chick pea: 16.5% of area and 18% of total production. Growth rates have been
1.02% for area, production 3.24%, and yield at 2.19%.
Grass pea: 9.7% of area and 10.3% of total pulse production output. Growth rates
have been 1.74% for area, production 3.59% and yield 1.82% during the 38 years.
Lentils: 8.1% of area and 6.3% of total pulse production. Area, production and
yield growth rates has been 2.89%, 4.76% and 1.82%, respectively.
9
It is estimated that only 70-73% total volume of wheat enters consumption with 27-30%
affected by impurities. These include desiccated grains, damaged grains by pests, grains in
which the germ is discolored, sprouted grains, miscellaneous impurities such as extraneous
seeds, extraneous matter, husks, ergots, decayed grains, dead insects, and other undesirable
material.
19
In sum, Ethiopia has the potential to substantially increase pulse crop

yields, and even in some cases at least double current yields.
Figure 4: Selected Pulse Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18

Pulse Yield/ha Field peasYield/ha
25.0
20.0 Pulses
Field peas
QUINTAL/HA
Pulses
15.0
Pulses Field peas Lentils

Filed peas
10.0 Field peas
8.88
Lentils
Lentils
5.0 Lentils Lentils
-
1979/80 1983/84 1987/88 1991/92 1995/96 1999/00 2004/05 2008/09 2012/13 2016/17
Oilseeds production (Graph 6)
Sesame: 39.4% of total area and 23.2% of the production of oilseeds. The area
under sesame grew at 15.34%, production at 18.48% and yield at 2.72%.
Neug (Niger seed): 31.1% of the total area dedicated to oilseeds and 29.3% of
total production in 2017/18.Growth rates have been 2.62%, production 5.15% and
yield 2.47% per annum.
Groundnuts (peanuts): 8.6% of area and 13.2% of total oilseeds production.
Growth rates have been 11.22% for area, production 13.49% and yield 2.04%.
Linseed (flax): 8.5% of area and 8.0% of production. The area grew at 1.71%,
production at 3.87% and yield at 2.12%.
Fenugreek: 3.5% area and 4.0% of total output of oilseeds. Area grew at a rate
of 3.77%, production at 8.05% and yield at 4.12% per annum.
Rapeseed accounts for 1.9% of area and 3% of oilseed production. Area grew at
a rate of 0.52%, production at 2.2% and yield 1.67%
20
Figure 5: Selected Oil Seeds Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18

Oil seeds Yield/ha Neug Yield/ha
20.0
Groundnuts
18.0
16.0
Groundnuts
14.0
Oil seeds
Quintal/ha
12.0
10.0
Groundnuts
8.0
Oil seeds
6.0 Oil seeds Neug
4.0
2.0 Neug Neug

Neug
-
1979/801983/841987/881991/921995/961999/002004/052008/092012/132016/17
The Livestock Sub-sector

The Ethiopian livestock sector is even more traditional than the crop
subsector. Ownership and spatial distribution of livestock resources among the
crop growing and pastoral areas is presented in Tables2 and 3, respectively.
Within the crop growing area, 3.7 million households (29.16%) are without cattle
holdings, while over 11 million households (92.7% of cattle owning households)
own between 1 to 9 head of cattle. In regional distribution, the Oromia State has
the largest number (4.7 million cattle), followed by the Amhara State (3.8 million)
and the SNNP Regional State (2.8 million). In terms of the equine population, a
few Regional States standout: a) Donkeys: Amhara State 1.878 million; Oromia
1.988 million; Tigray 521,928 and Gambela 496,226 account for 95.7% of the
national donkey total. b) Horses: Tigray 2,983, Amhara 299,890 and Oromia
722,377.
Livestock resource distribution in pastoral area is presented in Table 3.
Pastoral area accounts for 14% total cattle population, 19% sheep and 35% goats.
This shows that 86% of cattle population is located in cereal producing areas with
greater competition between crop and livestock over grazing and farm lands. The
geographical concentration and specialization of animal resources is an important
context for any livestock sector transformation agenda as shown in Tables 2 and
3).
21
As Table 4 shows, there is a considerable livestock resource in Ethiopia

disaggregated by regional States and combining livestock resources in crop
growing, pastoral and agro-pastoral areas. There are more than 56.7 million cattle,
29.3 million sheep and 29.1 million goats. The potential to transform the sector
as an economic engine for households and the nation is huge.
There have been a number of recent studies recommending
modernization options for the livestock sub-sector (UNIDO 2013, ILRI 2017,
FAO 2018/2019). The UNIDO study indicates that milk production in Ethiopia
has remained relatively low in terms of productivity: 2,160 Hg/annum for an
average cow milk, for the years 2000 - 2010 in Ethiopia; this compares with
Kenya (5,500 Hg/An), Egypt (14,500 Hg/An) and South Africa (32,700 Hg/An),
suggesting Ethiopia has considerable potential to increase milk production.
Currently, 90% of milk production in Ethiopia is undertaken by smallholder
farmers, depending almost entirely on natural grazing and most of the milk
produced retained for household consumption. Another problem is the largely
informal distribution and marketing system for milk and dairy products. There is
only a limited formal commercial system in operation. This is characterized by
the absence of licensing requirements, lack of regulation, low cost of operation
and high producer price when compared to the formal market. The traditional
processing and marketing of dairy products, especially of traditional soured
butter, dominates the Ethiopian dairy sector, and the traditional, unreliable and
unhygienic, processing methods contribute to poor product quality. The lack of
chilling and cooling facilities during milk collection leads to deterioration of milk
quality and high losses. Within the commercial sub-sector, problems of unreliable
supply and the high cost of packaging materials continue to limit investment in
processing and packaging technology. Most of the existing processing facilities
lack state-of-the-art technology for manufacture of value-added dairy products
such as UHT, yoghurt or ice-cream.
The UNIDO study also notes that despite the large number of dairy cows,
both the volume and value of Ethiopian dairy exports remains low. Butter is
exported to only a small number of countries including Djibouti, Somalia and South
Africa and to the Ethiopian diaspora. The import of dairy products varies
considerably year to year, but the value of imported dairy products is substantial
enough to lead to a negative net trade balance, ranging from US$ 5 million in 2007
to US$16 million in 2010.
22
Table 2: Cattle Holding Size in Main Crop Growing Areas by Region, 2014-2015
Number of Households by Cattle Holding Size
Regions
not owners 1-2 Head 3-4 Head 5-9 Head 10-19 Head 20-49 Head 50-99 Head 100-199 Head total Owners
Tigray 287,353 263,330 335,260 267,238 70,967 13,729 1,481 103 952,108
Afar 87,705 29,204 32,232 52,270 38,498 15,908 2,941 171,053
Amhara 1,003,187 1,387,062 1,349,692 953,993 132,376 11,283 1,389 3,835,795
Oromia 1,355,894 1,455,720 1,368,273 1,423,287 419,686 57,115 2,371 144 4,726,596
Somali 48,097 23,708 26,888 31,019 14,750 4,041 196 100,602
Benishangul-Gumuz 127,592 32,028 26,625 30,093 13,925 4,754 161 107,586
SNNP 772,980 1,105,073 979,778 634,189 90,814 22,156 4,574 1,339 2,837,923
Gambela 34,299 7,850 5,172 4,657 4,971 4,033 413 68 27,164
Harari 5,904 10,024 6,821 2,986 397 20,228
Dire Dawa 8,822 10,560 6,638 1,765 97 19,060
Ethiopia 3,731,833 4,324,559 4,137,379 3,401,497 786,481 133,019 13,526 1,654 12,798,115
%age 29.16 33.79 32.33 26.58 6.15 1.04 0.11 0.01
Source: Based on the CSA data, CSA 2016
23
Table 3: Livestock ownership in Pastoral Areas, 2014/2015

Livestock number and Borana Guji Bale South Omo
Afar Somali Total
ownership (Oromia) (Oromia) (Oromia) (SNNP)
Number of 1,495,054 1,081,553 1,503,241 1,566,521 631,059 1,776,996 8,054,424
Cattle Number of HH 156,239 134,459 268,668 280,022 97,836 110,123 1,047,347
Average Holding 9.6 8.0 5.6 5.6 6.5 16.1 7.7
Number of 1,732,090 343,674 567,042 298,293 1,308,309 1,243,506 5,492,914
Sheep Number of HH 144,920 60,496 148,752 48,011 95,036 69,912 567,127
Average Holding 12.0 5.7 3.8 6.2 13.8 17.8 9.7
Number of 3,301,056 876,139 423,698 726,394 1,835,811 3,084,232 10,247,330
Goat Number of HH 170,139 92,727 87,981 136,867 114,383 64,271 666,368
Average Holding 19.4 9.4 4.8 5.3 16.0 48.0 15.4
Number of 874 168,299 90,685 21,109 280,967
Horse Number of HH 874 90,730 37,832 3,508 132,944
Average Holding 1.0 1.9 2.4 6.0 2.1
Number of 133,481 73,762 97,997 239,705 148,724 26,215 719,884
Donkey Number of HH 98,659 46,753 65,726 156,190 91,791 11,453 470,572
Average Holding 1.4 1.6 1.5 1.5 1.6 2.3 1.5
Number of 636 2,102 16,291 17,272 71 5,110 41,482
Mule Number of HH 636 1,915 13,141 15,354 71 3,639 34,756
Average Holding 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.4 1.2
Number of 460,624 75,622 24,193 29,639 362,291 952,369
Camel Number of HH 78,463 17,464 7,608 10,961 42,247 156,743
Average Holding 5.9 4.3 3.2 2.7 8.6 6.1
Number of 106,355 689,154 914,064 710,593 177,300 1,218,629 3,816,095
Poultry Number of HH 17,865 86,440 137,528 116,638 29,192 96,405 484,068
Average Holding 6.0 8.0 6.6 6.1 6.1 12.6 7.9
Beehives 310 68,953 223,067 190,847 2,022 73,949 559,148
Source: Based on the CSA data, CSA 2016
24
Table 4: Total Livestock Resources of Ethiopia, 2014/15

Cattle Sheep Goats Horses Mules Donkeys Camels Poultry Beehives
Tigray 4,578,181 1,817,305 4,255,290 3,543 3,754 753,450 55,921 6,189,848 250,598
Afar 1,580,313 1,665,727 3,149,351 377 124,787 434,291 132,215 2,360
Amhara 14,710,911 10,024,277 6,064,944 420,760 157,213 2,677,429 66,364 18,031,121 1,361,329
Oromia 22,925,730 9,715,587 7,849,924 1,222,760 156,331 3,007,027 239,357 20,076,129 2,864,320
Somali 645,166 1,296,412 1,903,891 221 136,159 353,124 162,884 1,351
Benishangul-Gumuz 659,587 104,547 440,719 1,672 1,936 67,702 1,151 1,375,326 218,616
SNNP 11,215,636 4,580,220 5,092,628 382,927 78,334 630,492 2,865 10,433,773 1,127,618
Gambela 278,584 35,476 88,610 683 25 846 307,387 55,502
Harari 62,401 6,287 57,624 773 11,445 4,363 71,419 1,291
Dire Dawa 49,880 86,545 209,982 137 18,699 6,670 86,617 2,278
56,706,389 29,332,383 29,112,963 2,033,118 398,328 7,428,036 1,164,106 56,866,719 5,885,263
Source: CSA 2015, Agricultural Sample Survey, 2014/15
25
Animal feed is one of the defining challenges for both the traditional and
the commercial livestock sector. The traditional open grazing system faces steep
competition from crop production, and studies point out that the major constraints
for the very low production and productivity of livestock in Ethiopia are the poor
quality and inadequate quantity of available feed. The commercial sector lacks
sufficient feed production, and FAO (2019) and Bediye et al (2018) have
identified some of the challenges facing the commercial feed sector in Ethiopia.
The most common problems for animal feed production in Ethiopia can
be summarized:
a) Seasonality, shortage and high prices of feed ingredients that limit
sustainability and affordability of compound feeds;
b) The commercial feed sub-sector and livestock production face severe and
unfair taxation. For example, a 15% value added tax (VAT) is charged on
feed ingredients and on compound feeds, leading to double taxation for feed
ingredients and formula/compound feeds for ruminants. For poultry, the
government has recently taken the positive measure of removing VAT on
poultry feed ingredients and formula feeds, as most of the feed supplements,
especially premixes, are imported from abroad;
c) Ensuring feed safety and quality is one of the key challenges in the
commercial feed sector to avoid high aflatoxin levels in oilseed cakes and
compound feeds;
d) The response to the demand for compound feeds has not yet reached the
desired level as most of the feed processing plants are operating below
capacity;
e) Capacity to manufacture remixes, minerals and vitamins remains low and
importation is costly in terms of price and of foreign currency;
f) Technical services, both in terms of research and extension facilities, for
promotion of the commercial feed sector remain very weak or non-existent;
g) Feed processing plants are currently facing serious challenges in lack of
analytical services mainly because of high cost and inadequate service
delivery; and
h) The Ethiopian Animal Feed Industry Association (EAFIA), established in
2008, is still a young institution and it has not yet reached the desired level of
operation. It is facing technical, financial, and organizational challenges.
The FAO’s study makes it clear that agro-industrial by-products could

play a much more important role in meeting feed shortages in the country. It looks
at all available agro-industrial by-products from flour millings, sugar factories,
edible oil processing factories, breweries, and abattoirs as well as fishery by-
products, slaughterhouse offal, bagasse, molasses, sugarcane tops and fruit peels.
26
Molasses is used for ethanol production, but all the other by-products can play an
important role in the feeding of livestock, mainly in urban and peri-urban
livestock systems. There are around 300 wheat milling plants, of which 140 are
located in and around Addis Ababa; and some 202,134 tons of oilseed cake, from
niger seed (noug), groundnut, sesame, cotton, and safflower, are produced
annually. A substantial quantity of oilseeds is exported without value addition,
decreasing the availability of oilseed cakes for use for livestock. The offal
produced in the Addis Ababa Abattoir is processed into meat meal and bone meal
for poultry feed. Breweries produce useful by-products and the total from
domestic and modern breweries amounts to 635,343 tons of which 515,097 tons
comes from domestic brewing and distilling in the Oromia and Tigray States
alone – details of the contribution of other regions was unavailable.
In total, agro-industrial by-products simply do not produce anywhere
near the necessary quantity of feed. One reason is that most agro-industries are
running below capacity, in part because of insufficient or intermittent availability
of raw materials, including wheat, oilseeds etc., and water and/or power. In
addition, there are problems of proper storage of by-products at the production
site or on farms, of transport to users quickly enough and in proper containers,
plastic or metal with a cover and without leakage, or of proper loading and
unloading of by-products from vehicles. Linking the industries that produce by-
products with the feed industries, without intermediaries, and the introduction of
drying technologies at production sites to increase shelf-life, building the capacity
to properly manage the storage and handling at the production sites and on-farm,
would all help to reduce wastage. Equally important is enhancing awareness of
the importance of these by-products as animal feed, and inculcating the idea that
these are valuable resources.
The FAO’s study of feed availability and feed balance, which was
conducted in 2018, the first of its kind for Ethiopia, also underscores that the main
factors behind pastoral destitution in Ethiopia has been feed and water scarcity,
as the natural resource base in the rangelands is shrinking fast. Institutionalization
of a feed security system is therefore a necessity. It is needed to fully identify
needs, resource availability, gaps, implications and ways to fill those both in
Ethiopia and the region. This is required to make feed interventions in the country
effective in immediate, medium and long-term as well as provide solutions for
the region.
Another study, ILRI 2017, identified three key livestock commodity
value chains – poultry for chicken meat and eggs, crossbred cattle mainly for
milk, and red meat-milk from ruminants, indigenous cattle, sheep, goats, and
camels. These comprised smallholder families and commercial production
systems organized across lowland grazing, including both pastoral and agro-
27
pastoral systems, and highland crop-livestock mixed systems, both rainfall

deficient and rainfall sufficient.
Overall, a number of studies, including the ones just cited, concluded that
despite the livestock sector’s significant heard size, and its vast contributions to
the national and household economy, it continues to be constrained by numerous
factors:
✓ Poor market access and lack of infrastructure limits the value added of
farm/herds to an estimated 31.5% compared to 100% in member countries of
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
✓ Short supply channels lead to moderate post-harvest losses: in milk, these are
estimated at 3.4 %, and in meat to between 11% and 24%.
✓ Constraints in land and credit discourage entry into meat and dairy markets
despite the possibilities of a lucrative business environment in which there
are few competitors. Unfavorable regulatory and fiscal frameworks for land
allocation and feed production respectively, lead to a reluctance of private
operators to invest.
✓ Feed supply, in particular grass and fodder, is the main physical constraint
to further expansion of the livestock population.
✓ Animal disease constraints include Foot-and-Mouth disease, small ruminant
pests, tsetse-borne trypanosomiasis, external parasites (Ekek), sheep and goat
pox, and contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP).
3. Framing the Processes of Agricultural and Rural

Transformation
3.1. Conceptualizing Agricultural and Rural Transformation
The way the vocabulary of ‘agricultural transformation’ is being used in
policy and program documents, or in daily conversations within the diverse
national languages such as Amharic, Oromifa and others lacks clarity about what
it means, or what may be expected of it; nor is there agreement on how to
commence the transformation processes. Even more disconcerting is the absence
of ‘clarity’ of the concept of agricultural transformation within Ethiopia’s
academic and policy discourse. Needless to say, concept of agricultural and rural
transformation must be ‘clear’ and ‘objective’, that is, it must express, with
precision, the underlying assumption about necessary and sufficient economic,
social and technological changes, and offer unconstrained guidance for policy and
program action. Furthermore, transformation is not only about the processes
involved, it is also about the realization that it creates jobs, increase incomes,
improves lives and livelihoods, and protect the natural resources.
As shown in section 2.4 above, there is also a considerable confusion and
misunderstanding in comments about the state of Ethiopian agriculture. They all-
28
too-often simply emphasize quantitative crop production growth and ignore the
absence of any improvement in the conditions of life of millions of Ethiopians
and the lack of structural change which might offer new economic, technological,
organizational and production possibilities. The differing perceptions about
transformation trajectories raise three basic questions: first, what ‘measures’
agricultural and rural transformation; that is, how do we know if ‘transformation
is happening’? Second, are there verifiable efforts that link agriculture/rural
transformation to the manufacturing, services and urbanization at a decentralized
level? Thirdly, will Ethiopia be able to induce transformation at the necessary
speed and scale to end hunger and poverty by 2030 as called for in the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDG) and save environmental catastrophe?
To be clear from the outset: agricultural and rural transformation is
expressed here as the process of change from: a highly fragmented, risk and crisis-
laden production system, rain-dependent, relying on traditional tools, with
substandard conditions of life; to: one which is vibrant, wealth-creating, modern,
system devoted to the improved wellbeing of the population, capable of
producing for markets and supplying surplus for national demands for
consumption, manufacturing and export earnings, by fully employing modern
agricultural inputs, environmentally sustainable practices, and adopting farm
machineries commensurate with the 21st century’s technological and digital
innovations. Implicit in agricultural and rural transformation is the desire and the
necessity to improve human condition in all its forms, and at all times.
To clarify and depict this definition, four integrated processes are considered
to trigger and measure progress towards agricultural and rural transformation:
performance, institution, structure, and time, the period necessary for the evolution
of Ethiopian agriculture (Figure 6, Box 2).
The starting point of agricultural and rural transformation in Ethiopia is
to remove the many obstacles discussed above, herein referred to as systemic
triggers (see Figure 6, Box 1). As has been discussed above, principal triggers
include: i) sustained and intergeneration commitments and leadership, ii)
continuously adapted constitutional, legal and regulatory conditions that facilitate
the transformation processes at speed and scale; iii) shared responsibility between
private sector and the State, with the state providing the means necessary for a
decisive private sector leadership of the transformation process; iv) availability
of a technological and innovation option that expands and delivers agricultural
mechanization; v) commitment to the creation of human talent and skills to
effectively and accountably implement agricultural and rural transformation; vi)
facilitation and where necessary creation of rural and agricultural financial and
credit services and banks, and vii) early and extensive work on environmental
sustainability.
29
Figure 6: Processes of Agricultural & Rural Transformation: Triggers,

Indicators & Outcomes
Source: Diriba, 2018. Overcoming Food and Agricultural Crises (and an expanded second
edition, forthcoming).
Simultaneously, and as systemic triggers are acted upon, collective action

is needed to induce social and attitudinal changes embodied in ‘institution’, that
is totality of the norms, values and relationships that characterize Ethiopian
society with a profound influence on agricultural performance, accepting, for
example, as a way of life the substandard conditions of living of millions of rural
households (see Figure 6, Box 2). ‘Institution ’includes political institutions,
traditional and/or modern elements, family and community structures, religious
bodies, ideologies, beliefs and values. It is about how a society perceives or
recognizes the conditions of life, environmental changes, production systems, and
interactions inside or outside an immediate community or societal structure.
Seven characteristics of institutions need to be considered to unravel the puzzle
of development and agricultural transformation in Ethiopia. These are: cultural
and normative practices; religion and faith; functional and legal practices;
cognitive processes; organizational densities; persistence; and organizational
manifestation. They offer an entry into and a deeper understanding about what
holds back and/or prevents Ethiopia from innovations and embracing
technologies to free millions of its citizens from chronic deprivation of food and
basic necessities. As such, they provide a deeper understanding of structural
30
change and equilibria within and among the factors that make up the national
economy. These and additional elements discussed below will serve as integrated
indicators of transformation.
Another indicator of transformation is structural change (see Figure 6,
Box 2) which measures progress towards agricultural transformation; it measures
changes from the traditional systems of production, relying on ard-plow and
rainfall, to modern production systems that utilize mechanized practices, allows
significantly enhanced land and labor productivity, and offers a shift in the relative
proportion of agriculture within the broader national economy, as well as changes
in the living standards of the population. In a broad sense, structure is the most
important input of social and economic transformation. For this reason, structural
change is complex and it is central to accelerating and/or constraining agricultural
transformation over time.
The third process is about measuring outcomes of agricultural
transformation, that is ‘performance’, being measured in terms of improvements in
the wellbeing of the population, and it is assessed in the following five ways, which
characterizes their definition of food security for Ethiopia (see Figure 6, Box 3).
✓ First, agricultural performance must be evaluated in terms of its capacity to
provide food security, at the most basic level, for human nutrition and
survival requirements for producing and consuming units. Nutritional
requirements can be met directly from farm products and/or from markets in
exchange for farm /labor income.
✓ Second, agricultural performance must also be assessed in terms of its capacity
to meet the social, personal and communal, and economic necessities of life
such as shelter, clothing, medical, educational and locally determined
communal expenses including the capacity to pay for leisure activities, even if
these are rare for most Ethiopians. In other words, agricultural performance
assessment must be expressed in terms of cash income that can pay for health,
educational and other related social obligations for the participants in the sector.
✓ Third, agricultural performance must go beyond the maintenance of life; it
must serve as a business enterprise where farmers invest in innovation and
technological change to enhance land and labor productivity. Agricultural
performance should be measured in terms of its capacity to afford producers
the ability to purchase farm inputs and tools including fertilizer, seeds,
pesticides, and the replacement of tools including maresha, hoes, racks, and
investments in mechanization, hay-making, milk-processing and beef
production, afford agricultural machine rental or purchase investment in
irrigation to reduce the risks of dependence on rainfall as well as investment
in modern livestock rearing and animal product processing.
✓ Fourth, agricultural performance must also be assessed by capacity of
households, the producing units, to mitigate risk in the event of crop failure
or animal deaths. Risk can be mitigated by savings put aside from agricultural
31
produce either in-kind or in cash or through purchase of risk insurance, if

such schemes are available. Agriculture should also provide a cushion for
shocks and provide for ‘risk management’ either in direct savings from crops
or animals or in cash. Although agricultural risk management and/or ‘risk
insurance’ is a modern concept to most Ethiopian farmers, the concept is as
old as the emergence of agriculture which has developed a built-in traditional
system to provide a cushion in times of need in the form of grain saving,
borrowing, reciprocity, migration, crop diversification, dispersion of farm
plots in different locations or differing agro-ecological zones, and other ways.
✓ Fifth, agriculture performance also includes saving beyond year-on-year
consumption and expenditure, and must be able to contribute to creation of
wealth, guaranteeing pensions or social insurance. Implicit in the
performance matrix is the extent to which Ethiopia’s agriculture is open to
and utilizes mechanization options that could have profound impact on
performance of the agricultural sector as well as improve the wellbeing of the
population.
Finally, it is important to be mindful of the time it takes to fully rollout
agricultural and rural transformation. This refers to the evolution and temporal
changes in agriculture, and it explains the sequence of events that influence the
structure and performance of agriculture over a sustained period of time.
Individuals, societies and governments often become pre-occupied with on-going
and current events, ignoring the sum total of changes over a long period of time,
generally referred to as economic or social history. History, however, is not just
the record of events from the past but is also the science and action of human
societies as they happen. It is important that we understand the social, economic
and technological changes of a society through the lens of time. That is, ‘time’ as
expressed in a single cropping season, a program or project period, a particular
event such as a revolution, the duration a government stays in power, a
generation, centuries or even millennia. It is important to observe what may have
happened in successive cropping seasons, or during a series of program cycles,
over the period of successive governments, or even over centuries or millennia.
Without this, Ethiopia misses the effect, the impact of cumulative change over
time.
3.2. Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Development

Literature
The most widely accepted characterization of agricultural transformation
is one that describes the shift from highly diversified, subsistence-oriented farms
towards more specialized production, and market supply. Delgado (1995:3)
further expands agricultural transformation as offering ‘specialization in
32
production, greater use of purchased inputs, greater resource flows to farming,

and substantial cuts in unit costs of production from technological changes.’ In
fact, numerous characterization and descriptions of agricultural transformation
abound: agricultural populations move out of farming, becoming dependent on
the market, rising ratio of agribusiness value added as part of rural-centered
agricultural transformation, aggregation of small farms, technologies responding
to factor prices (land, labor and capital), increased infrastructure, higher
information/communication penetration, and integration of agriculture into a
wider economy (Timmer 1998, FAO 2017, Naseem 2017). These
characterizations of agricultural transformation in international literature are
important, but they do not tell us what actually triggers the transformation
processes, whether they need accidental or deliberate political action, or what
conditions must be put in place for agricultural transformation to happen or to be
rolled out on a large scale. They do not suggest what performance matrix should
be deployed to understand and measure if a transformation is taking place at the
desired speed and scale. And most markedly, international transformation
literature does not focus on the quality of lives of the agricultural population or
on changes in their wellbeing, except through implicit assumption about ending
hunger and poverty.
Historically, when agricultural transformation started in Europe, the
principal motivation was to reduce the price of food in order to allow for cheaper
wage labor. Lewis: “If the capitalist sector produces no food, its expansion
increases the demand for food, raises the price of food in terms of capitalist
products, and so reduces profits. This is one of the senses in which
industrialization is dependent upon agricultural improvement; it is not profitable
to produce a growing volume of manufactures unless agricultural production is
growing simultaneously. This is also why industrial and agrarian revolutions
always go together, and why economies in which agriculture is stagnant do not
show industrial development” (quoted in Timmer 1998).
A number of other objectives for agricultural transformation have been
shown in development literature, especially since the mid-20th century. The more
immediate and primary objectives of investing in agricultural transformation is
“to reduce hunger and poverty”, that is provide an agricultural-led development
strategy that would produce more food, and generate more employment in the
short-run, as has been the case with Ethiopia’s policy guidance of the Agricultural
Development Led Industrialization (ADLI). The hunger and poverty reduction
objectives are important for developing countries such as Ethiopia; but they
33
should not be the ultimate goal of agricultural transformation. This must be

modernizing the agricultural sector for the long-term, and improving the rural
living conditions of the population, thereby reducing poverty and hunger.
Releasing surplus labor in agriculture long with the rising land and labor
productivity is not an end in itself for Ethiopia or for many developing economies
of Africa. In fact, in Ethiopia, numerous factors are pushing out the agricultural
labor force without there being sufficient and necessary conditions to absorb it in
the manufacturing and service sectors. Surplus labor must serve for the gradual
emergence and expansion of the manufacturing and service sectors, the later
motivating the former. Another objective of agricultural transformation in
international development literature is to decrease the relative role of agriculture
in the economy10.Such views continue to influence scholars and politicians alike.
In a recent literature on Ethiopia, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed,
reflects a similar sentiment of agriculture as ‘dying as it is growing–‘ዓዳጊሟች’,
and he states that “ግብርናዉ የፈለገ እድገት ቢያሳይ የአንዲትን ሀገር አዳጊ ፍላጎቶች እስከ መጨረሻ
ይዞ መጓዝ ያጠያይቃል።ለዚህም ነዉ አንዳንድ ምሁራን ግብርናን “ኣዳጊሟች” ሲሉ የሚገልጹት”
(መደመር፡ 2012፡ 218)። The persistent views of ‘dying agriculture’ is far from the
reality in Ethiopia. Agriculture has been and will continue to be the most
important sector with an undiminished role in the national food and economic
security objectives. What has happened in historical processes, and can be
expected to happen in Ethiopia, is the ratio of agriculture’s primary value will
decrease (expressed in crop and animal production, that is without considering
agricultural derivatives). This is, however, an inadequate measure of the role of
agriculture, and as discussed above, when agriculture and rural economies are
transformed, the role of agriculture is elevated, not diminished, as the
commanding element in the Ethiopian economy and peace and security; surplus
labor will be transferred to agricultural product processing. Heavy industrial
development remains a long-term prospect, and initial investible surplus, income
and capital, has to be generated in agriculture in order for growth to occur broadly
in the national economy. In fact, of course, agriculture adds significant value to
other sectors such as the manufacturing and service sectors, in the form of agro-
processing. Certainly, given the dominant11size of agriculture in Ethiopia, it will
remain the most vital sector of the national economy. The non-agricultural
10 See Staatz, 1994. The Strategic Role of Food and Agricultural Systems in Fighting Hunger
Through Fostering Sustainable Economic Growth. See also Timmer 2007 in Handbook of
Development Economics, Volume 1.
11
Dominance of agriculture is expressed in the number of people it employs, geographical
dispersion, number of households, and as the principal supplier of national consumption,
manufacturing and export earnings.
34
sectors, without agricultural product derivatives, will be smaller relative to

agriculture and its allied economic benefits.
The challenge for Ethiopia and other developing countries in Africa is to
balance resource allocation judiciously among agriculture, manufacturing and
services sectors and offer equitable incentives to develop urban and rural
infrastructure. Withholding resources too soon, or withdrawing them from
agriculture to finance expansion in other sectors will have a dual impact, delaying
agricultural transformation and limiting supplies of food and raw material, such
as cotton, oil seeds, or grain for the manufacturing and the service sectors. The
service sector will also suffer from dampened demands as a result of high food
commodity prices, having massive effects on urban consumers as well as the
wage-dependent rural population. These are, indeed, the precise conditions
playing out in contemporary Ethiopia.
To deal with the effects of agricultural production deficits, national
policies are often geared towards importing agricultural commodities to curb
price rises and limit potential social unrest. This policy option may be necessary
to address the short-term supply deficits. In the medium and long-term, however,
it can only further exacerbate a downward spiral of agricultural growth as
domestic producers are unable to compete with the highly productive farms of
developed economies. As is the present case in Ethiopia today, domestic wheat
prices are nearly three times higher than imported wheat. The low price of
imported wheat, combined with periodic peaks in food aid deliveries, often
undercuts possible price incentives that could have facilitated investment and
innovation for domestic producers. On a recent visit12 to Arsi in Oromia Regional
State, the author saw conflicting responses to the low price of imported wheat and
vegetable oil. Producers of wheat were strongly critical of the lower price of
imported wheat; consumers in both urban and rural areas expressed approval.
Policies advocated in the international development literature, to
“squeeze agriculture on behalf of the more dynamic sectors of the economy”, are
highly damaging to any possible transformation of the sector, especially in
countries where agriculture is the principal source of food and income. The
context of Ethiopia is vastly different from the European and American
transformation processes that have largely informed the scholarship of much of
the writings and conceptual underpinnings of agricultural and economic
transformation. Contrary to the “squeezing out” hypothesis, agriculture and the
rural sectors have to be transformed and be modernized to allow for any
expectation of economic equilibrium. If and when land and labor productivity
12
A field visit to Arsi and the adjoining areas is a regular exercise of the author in part to
inform the write up of this discussion paper and preparation of the second edition of his
“Overcoming Food and Agricultural Crises in Ethiopia”.
35
increases are comparable to the globally motorized farms, then it may be feasible
to anticipate transmission of the productivity gains in agriculture to other sectors
of the national economy in the form of savings, lowered price of agricultural and
manufactured commodities for consumers, and capital flows from agriculture to
urban areas for investment in services or manufacturing sectors without being
“squeezed”. In an economic equilibrium, the value of the agricultural surplus is
capitalized in and outside agriculture; and land is capitalized as agricultural land,
through aggregation and consolidation, with expanding urbanization offering
lucrative land values. This also assumes State facilitation of decentralized
urbanization, rural industrialization, agro-processing, technical assistance for
skills development, credit and financing arrangements, property rights, and
national educational systems that can respond to emerging talent demands across
all sectors. These natural process of capital flows, from agriculture into the
manufacturing and service sectors, cannot however occur if the agricultural sector
remains traditional, with low productivity, and living standards of the population
near or below subsistence as is the case in Ethiopia. If agriculture is forcibly
“squeezed” by State intervention, it creates stagnation, not transformation.
Implicit in the processes of agricultural transformation are greater
performance of institutional and structural changes through time that will bring
about resolution of national food concerns, induce voluntary resource outflows
from agriculture, and bring about the adoption of technologies without passing
through the historically costly processes of technological invention. Agricultural
and rural transformation induce quantitative, structural and technological
transformation of largely traditional and subsistence agriculture, and can be
expected to improve living conditions. Indeed, Ethiopia has sought for this, in
policy terms, as when the EPRDF administration introduced the Agricultural-
Development-Led-Industrialization (ADLI) policy to provide an underpinning for
developmental architecture. The ADLI has, however, had difficulty in getting off
the ground in the spirit expressed by its designers; it is now necessary to revamp an
integrative framework of transformation in the light of Ethiopia’s present context
offered in the concluding section of this discussion paper.
It is important to keep in mind that rural and agricultural transformation are
inseparable and they offer inclusive development opportunities for all Ethiopians. As
important, in the short and medium term, is the fact that most growth opportunities
will continue to come from agriculture: food production, employment in agriculture
and allied sub-sectors, food manufacturing, food services, and agriculturally based
trade. These can and will make significant contributions to the non-agricultural
growth processes including employment generation.
36
3.3 Triggers of Agricultural and Rural Transformation

The question of what actually triggers and drives agricultural
transformation is an important one and often neglected in development literature
as well as in development discourse. There are no clear-cut theoretical models
nor any uniform procedures to guide countries in starting or sustaining
agricultural and rural transformation processes. Responses to and guidance of
transformation can only be found in broader social, technological and
modernization theories, and most of the suggested options are dependent on
country and context-specific political and policy commitments to transformation.
Within broader development processes, countries can consider streams of
technical changes and complementary reforms (see Figure 6). These can include
the too-often neglected roles of institutions, the relevance of legal systems,
organizational capacity, cognition and leadership capacities, social norms and
values, and commitments to change, as well as recognizing the many facets of the
problems of traditional agricultural and rural development. Ethiopia’s
commitments, for example, must include ways to unravel the legal constraints,
and provide for universal property rights permitting land consolidation to
facilitate mechanization and durable investment to improve the land, enhance
organizational efficiencies and accountabilities, lower costs of agricultural inputs,
reduce high transaction costs, and deliver investment in infrastructure. Additional
triggers include accessing the knowledge and skills embodied in technologies and
management practices, and the provision of an organizational system that
recognizes and motivates citizenry, especially youth, to participate and invest in
agriculture. In a 21st century context, economic growth and social changes depend
increasingly on embodied knowledge and self-learning. A critical task is to
identify the most effective mechanisms to transfer knowledge and skills to
agricultural households and assure them of an inclusive and equitable share of the
benefits. In this context, the traditional extension system will continue to be
needed but its efficacy will have to be complemented or even replaced by online
learning and private sector agricultural extension services.
Agricultural transformation is contingent on organizational, social and
technological adaptation, commitments to modernization and improvements in
the living conditions of the farming population. The 20th century scholarship that
continues to influence the development agenda in Africa, and certainly in
Ethiopia, is now facing vastly different forms and processes in the 21st century.
Naseem et al (2017) has rightly noted, “the characterization of contemporary
structural transformation primarily in terms of productivity, employment, and
migration seems unsatisfactory. Other attributes need to be considered that may
affect the process of structural transformation. There are considerable differences
in the initial conditions and the global economic environment in which today’s
37
agriculturally-based economies find themselves in, that the process of structural

transformation is likely to be different in the coming decades.”The study points
out that new opportunities may create an environment that is more conducive to
a rural centered agricultural transformation, with, for example, new agricultural
value-added products and services closer to farms allowing households to
generate incomes through non-farm activities, often enabled by information and
communication technologies and other technical advances. Diriba (2018) has
emphasized that the holy-grail of agricultural transformation is to be found in
institutional changes that will facilitate and capture economies of scale in the
provision of services such as mechanization, delivery of inputs, financial services,
and transmission of skills and know-how to the farming population. It should also
be noted that the increased competition for export-based markets, a major element
in the Asian structural transformation experience, is largely inapplicable for
Ethiopia, due to the paucity of technological openings, lack of financial services,
and limitations of talents and skills.
Sustaining agricultural transformation has to look to important
policymaking and programming activities including: a) provision of a
quantifiable vision and strategy for agricultural transformation (Mellor 1973); b)
sustained and verifiable inter-generational commitments over an extended period
of time (Diriba 2018); c) sustained resource allocation to the rural and agricultural
development, providing for example, 10% of national expenditure to agriculture
(AU/NEPAD 2010); and d) a carefully balanced prioritization of agricultural and
rural transformation with other sectors of the economy including manufacturing,
services, urbanization and infrastructural expansion.
It is important to emphasize the inseparable linkage between agriculture
and rural transformation. The links are not imaginary; rather policymakers and
development practitioners must be guided by pragmatic resource allocation for
inclusive and decentralized development opportunities. There are three major
considerations.
• First, at the most general level, to achieve the ambition of transforming
agriculture from subsistence production to one of technology-employing
agriculture, Ethiopia must induce technical change. This must cover
policies, investment, and an enabling environment focusing on the removal
of organizational and legal constraints for all sectors. It must facilitate and
ease a greater use of agricultural input supplies, increased land and labor
productivity, the use of fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and irrigation, as well
as the expansion of manufacturing and service industries, all of which will
result in structural transformation. In Ethiopia, no sector can be transformed
in isolation. The relative shift of the ratio between agriculture,
manufacturing and services should not be used as a tool for resource-
38
allocation decisions nor should it be relevant as an indicator of

transformation.
• At a sector level, within agriculture itself, crop productivity increase is
certainly necessary but this is insufficient to produce all-inclusive
agricultural transformation. As we have seen, partial and low-level
utilization of agricultural inputs has tended to increase crop productivity per
hectare of land. Combined with the expansion in the area of land usage
arising from population increases and utilization of agricultural inputs, this
has led to increased quantitative crop production at an aggregate national
level. This has provided a temporary respite to poverty and hunger, but in
spite of crop productivity gains, the organizational, structural and
technological constraints have remained. Agricultural and rural
transformation have not been taking place at the scale and speed they ought
to be in Ethiopia. The apparent relative ‘decline in poverty and hunger’, in
monetary average, is not a signal of agricultural and rural transformation;
millions of Ethiopians continue to suffer from substandard living conditions
including hunger and income poverty.
• Rural transformation is often assumed to occur as part of an agricultural
transformation process, or as an outcome of other economic processes13. For
a comprehensive transformation to take place on a scale that is sustainable
and inclusive of the people’s conditions, the rural areas must become an
integral part of the political and programmatic choices that make up the
transformation agenda. Rural transformation means creation of an
ecosystem in which the transformation of agriculture takes place, improved
human wellbeing is provided, environmental protection is ensured, changes
in the mindset of the population commence, rural services are provided,
conditions of life for the rural population significantly improved with
resulting market participation, and the availability of a large proportion of
home consumed commodities.
4. A Call to Action: Incentives and Reform Considerations

4.1. Quadruple Sector Approach to Transformation
Implementing agricultural and rural transformation cannot take place
without an integrated and synergistic linkage with other sectors of the economy.
In context of Ethiopia, there are four interlinked sectors: agriculture along with
its rural environs, manufacturing, services, and urbanization. Each of these are
expanded further below. The context and developmental stage of Ethiopia
13
Ethiopia’s rural development policy document was developed in 2004, There has not,
however, been any meaningful or practical action to realize it.
39
demands recognition that agricultural and rural transformation are intrinsically

linked; the one cannot transform without the corresponding transformation of the
other. Nor can agriculture, manufacturing, services and urbanization succeed in
isolation of each other.
The starting point for decisive and urgent agricultural and rural
transformation is the recognition that Ethiopia’s smallholder agriculture is faced
with severe challenges that have been accumulating for many decades. Ethiopia
has now put in place a number of building blocks to rollout an economy-wide
transformation at speed and scale. These building blocks include many decades
of experience across different sectors and the economy, allowing for expanded
infrastructure and services, the conception and construction of industrial parks at
strategic locations, expansion of primary, secondary and tertiary educational
opportunities, and the achievement of quantitative production increases in
agriculture. Equally, in implementing agricultural and rural transformation,
Ethiopia must climb new heights of economic and social transformation, building
on the gains and experiences of the past, and committing itself to a long-term,
inter-generational, and sustainable transformation of agriculture. These long-term
commitments will require continuous adaptation of programs and strategies
within and across each of the principal sectors.
The quadruple sector approach offers an inclusive platform of
development that can dramatically improve the conditions of Ethiopia’s
population, especially those in rural areas. Unquestionably, rolling out an
economy-wide transformation with agriculture as a lead sector demands bold
commitments and tangible actions by all Ethiopians and its leadership at all
levels. It involves creating sufficient and necessary conditions to trigger and
sustain agricultural and rural transformation.
Firstly, agriculture and rural transformation must remain central and serve as
the precondition for the transformation of the other principal sectors. For this
reason, Federal and Regional State guidance is critical to establish linkages
among the principal sectors and placing agriculture as primus inter pares, first
among equals.
Secondly, the development of rural industrialization and expanded
manufacturing capacities must be supported, initially focusing on agro-
processing including production of poultry, dairy, beef cattle and oilseeds, and
flour mills just to mention a few areas. The very foundation of rural
industrialization is enhanced productivity and a gradual move to specialization in
specific products. A comprehensive list of realistic and locally viable rural
industrialization opportunities and options must be worked out at Kebele and
Woreda level. Rural industrialization must be conceived strategically, and it must
reflect the condition of Ethiopian smallholder farmers. In this way, rural
industrialization can serve as an inclusive development opportunity.
40
Third: Decentralized urbanization. Urbanization typically accompanies rapid

progress of agricultural and rural transformation, which in turn can be fueled by
expanded urbanization, especially in the growth of manufacturing and services.
As agricultural transformation takes off, and as a result of rises labor productivity,
increasing numbers of people will be compelled to leave the rural areas. These
people will be required to either sell or mortgage their land and move to urban
centers to establish themselves as wage laborers or traders. A decentralized urban
development strategy commensurate with strategic urban planning must be
considered, providing services such as land valuation and designation of urban
sites, water supply, electricity, educational and health facilities, housing designs
including affordable building material, among others. The key is to ensure that
there is a sufficient pull factor at the Kebele and Woreda level for urbanization so
that all surplus labor does not try to move into Federal or Regional capital cities.
While some migration is unavoidable, sufficient urban service delivery incentives
and policy instruments must first be put in place at a decentralized level, focusing
on small towns. This must include the provision of rural housing, including key
facilities such as rural electrification, water and rural transportation systems.
Rural transportation systems permit farmers to commute to and from their farms
should they decide to retain a dualistic economic model.
Finally, there’s the need for social, physical, digital and market infrastructure
and services as these will increase dramatically as the productive sectors of the
economy transform.
In summary and as already presented earlier, the quadruple sector
transformation framework replaces the ADLI framework, and a major task will
be to balance resource allocation judiciously among the principal sectors. To
reiterate: withholding resources too soon, or withdrawing them from agriculture
to finance expansion in other sectors will delay agricultural transformation and
limit supplies of food and raw material, such as cotton, oil seeds, or grain to the
manufacturing and service sectors. It would also undermine the national and
household wealth creation that can be reinvested in infrastructure and technology
generation. The service sector would also suffer from dampened demands
following high food commodity prices, and have massive effects on consumers
as well as wage-dependent population in both rural and urban areas. These are, in
fact, the precise conditions playing out in contemporary Ethiopia.
This four sector transformation agenda must now be supported by
homegrown and Ethiopia-specific scholarly researches focusing on the
transformation processes, triggers and indicators. These studies must offer a
realistic assessment of options, and provide practical and policy relevant
recommendations. While lessons from successful transformation elsewhere in the
world are useful to suggest, inspire and motivate ideas and actions, it is also
important to recognize that past experiences, especially agriculture, in Europe,
North America and elsewhere, cannot be transferred in toto. They do not
41
correspond to 21st century Ethiopia. Ethiopia has to identify transformation

pathways that reflect its own cultural, institutional and domestic capacities.
A number of incentives and reform priorities are suggested here as a basis
for enacting agricultural and rural transformation in the light of the ‘systemic
triggers, integrated processes and integrated outcomes’ detailed in the previous
sections (see Figure 6), and expanded below.
4.2. Sustained and Intergenerational Commitments to

Transformation
The starting point for Federal and State leaders is to commit to and lead
the agricultural and rural transformation with vision and tenacity, with all the
political capital they can command, mobilizing the public at large, and inducing
the necessary technological and social changes. There can be no illusions about
the complex processes of social, economic, technological and legal processes
needed to enact agricultural and rural transformation. It will take generational
commitments to fully achieve them. Without the visible commitment of the
highest authority in the land, transformation will not take off. Ethiopia’s
agricultural and rural conditions cannot compare with modern agricultural
practices elsewhere in the world, nor does the current stage of agricultural
development offer any respite for social and economic malaise affecting millions
of Ethiopians today. Ethiopia cannot afford to postpone agricultural and rural
transformation as it did in the 1960s. Ethiopia has ignored the signals of the
devastating famines in 1973/74 and 1983/85. Since then, nearly all parts of the
country have been engulfed by food shortages of various magnitude. The absence
of episodes of famine or of famine mortality, thanks to continuous foreign aid and
the work of humanitarian workers, must not be mistaken for any normal
agricultural economic situation. It is anything but that.
It is similarly important to underline that a reduced ratio of agriculture
relative to the overall economy should not be mistaken for the commencement of
agricultural transformation. The key determinants of transformation are
increasing labor and land productivity, gradual and expanded utilization of
mechanization, reduced food insecurity and vulnerability, and visible evidence of
agricultural wealth creation that can be invested within and outside agriculture.
Agriculture and its twin, rural transformation, must be supported by efficient
organizational arrangements including agricultural banks and rural financial
services, skills and technology delivery systems. Beyond mere policy intent,
agriculture and rural transformation must be demonstrably linked with
manufacturing industries, developments in the service sector and decentralized
urbanization. For Ethiopia, agriculture will certainly continue to play an
undiminished role in food security and provide essential economic functions. To
42
fully appreciate the commanding heights of agriculture, it is necessary to calculate

the value of textiles, leather products, flour mills, oil presses, restaurant services,
bakeries and others. In effect, there is essentially very little manufacturing or
services without contributions from the agricultural sector.
The Federal Government and the Regional States must craft a carefully
thought-through division of labor to avoid duplication of functions regarding the
agricultural and rural transformation processes. There are a number of
ambiguities regarding the economy to be seen in the constitution. The Federal
Government and Regional States must prioritize and invest in infrastructure to
support urbanization and rural industrialization. Prioritized, strategic centers for
agricultural and rural transformation must be identified to serve for a
decentralized urbanization strategy as well as supporting transformation
initiatives across all sectors of the economy, including manufacturing, services,
agriculture and rural livelihood improvement. This can be achieved by investing
in rural roads, housing, electrification, and expanded digital services, both
Internet and telephone, and enacting social change. With economic opportunities,
and improved living standards for both rural and urban populations, it is feasible
to anticipate gradually increasing household participation in markets, a gradual
shift from utilizing home processed supplies to market supplied processed goods
and services.
Together with the private sector, it is important that the Federal
Government and Regional States work in tandem to develop a coherent political
and policy for decentralized urbanization, for population migration including
property rights that will facilitate and support urbanization strategies and
programs. Urbanization will also serve to create transmission centers of
competitive market prices. Competitive markets are usually characterized by
prices being near to the marginal cost of production and an absence of rent
seeking behavior. They facilitate efficient allocation of scare resources. One way
to measure market efficiency is to see how large the price gaps are between
domestic prices and border prices. Market price gaps result from poor
infrastructure, high processing costs, obsolete technology, government taxes and
fees, high profit margins captured by various marketing agents, illegal bribes and
other informal costs.
Government guidance is critical to establish linkages among sectors.
During the initial period, agriculture and rural sectors must be treated primus inter
pares, first among equals, vis-a-vis other sectors of the economy in order to put
agriculture firmly on the path of transformation. Cereals, pulses, and oilseed
production must be linked to agro-processing manufacturing and value adding
activities such as flour mills, biscuits, oil presses, and increasing national
production to meet demands and reducing prices to consumers. Similarly,
43
livestock production must aim at increased milk processing and packaging, meat
processing and value addition activities. Cotton production should be fully linked
to textile manufacturing.
A decline in the share of primary agricultural products will occur
gradually as modernization and mechanization become firmly rooted, as farm
sizes begin to consolidate, as land and labor productivities significantly increase,
and manufacturing and processing industries expand. So, in order for agricultural
transformation to be sustainable, it must be pragmatically but firmly linked to
developments in the manufacturing and service sectors of the economy. Finding
an equilibrium between the agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors is the
most important political and technical decision Ethiopia will have to make. It is
important to keep in mind that owners of manufacturing and service sector
industries, the elite, have proximity to the political power that can influence
policy choices and other decisions in their favor. This might lead to the
withdrawal or significant reduction in investment in agriculture and rural areas,
so undermining and/or delaying agricultural and rural transformation. This
possibility calls for serious political arbitrage through, for example, exemplary
and dedicated governance to support a transformation agenda, both at federal and
regional state levels, private sector and active civil society voice. An economy-
wide structural transformation can manifestly lead to greater employment across
all sectors, especially in agriculture and allied rural activities, at least initially. It
will also lead to improved incomes, especially as the price of food drops
following surplus production that exceeds domestic demands, coupled with better
and expanded services for housing, water and electricity as well as educational
and health facilities.
4.3 Legal and Regulatory Environment to Facilitate

Transformation
To realize agricultural and rural transformation, requires thoughtful and
boldly considered land consolidation and property rights arrangements. The
question of land consolidation needs to be defined within a broader property
rights policy that embraces leasing, mortgaging, and facilitating long-term
strategic investment on the land. Land property rights should be considered from
the point of view of output growth and the welfare of the smallholder farmers.
They should not be seen through the prism of politics and ideology as in the past,
but rather, aligned to allow for the basic sustenance of life when cultivated, and
offer a legal means to mortgage, lease, or liquidate when appropriate. They should
also facilitate utilization of agricultural mechanization and rural industrialization.
Land rights should be properly and pragmatically considered so that land size
does not continue to be the breeding ground of an interminable food crisis. Land
44
ownership or entitlement, in fact, must allow farmers to either stay on the farm or
move to urban areas where he/she might invest in business activities using the
income from land liquidation. The liquidation process, with appropriate
valuation, must offer access to capital and the opportunity for consolidating
fragmented land holdings. Land property rights is one of the transformative areas
of institutional change that can spur agricultural growth and develop other sectors
by turning “dead capital” into investible and transformative funds.
Importantly, the consolidation process must also protect smallholder
farmers from the greed of the elites and rent-seekers, as well as from eviction by
creating a legal mechanism for equity, and the determination of a ‘fairer land
value’ system based on its relative location. It must consider the specific context
of land within pastoral areas under special arrangements and facilitate investment
in water drilling and pasture land management, as well as the clearing of bushes
to minimize and reverse desertification. It should classify land in crop areas
keeping in mind commercial and irrigation potential and feasibilities for
expansion; and differentiate land in suburban areas and areas of urban expansion
with the highest land value.
Policies and programs for land property rights must help reverse
declining land availability, fragmentation, and land degradation. A crucial
element for land consolidation must be to ensure farmers’ access to and ability to
employ technology to enhance productivity. The debate about farm-size, of small
versus commercial farms, is based broadly on ideological rather than practical
considerations. Farm size aggregation will pave the way to link the development
of agriculture, manufacturing, services and urbanization and the accompanying
investment in infrastructural development. If legal and constitutional conditions
are met, farm size aggregation becomes a matter of individual choice rather than
elite-motivated political calculation. It also helps eliminate duality of land system
between rural and urban populations. Overall, land property rights can facilitate
the emergence of small and medium scale investments in agricultural activities
by providing the legal means for land transfer on a long-term basis (whether by
lease, sale, mortgage, or rent). This calls for amending the constitution, as well as
the provision of an acceptable legal and regulatory environment.
No one can foretell how farm households will respond to full ownership
rights, and meaningless pontification is of no help. Nevertheless, farm size
aggregation will certainly pave the way to link the development of agriculture,
manufacturing, services and urbanization and the accompanying investment in
infrastructural development.
4.4. Decisive Agricultural Mechanization and Access to Inputs
The immediate and supreme priority for the 21st century Ethiopian is
adoption of agricultural mechanization and involvement in the ‘creative
destruction’ of technology. Maresha and hoe cultivation system must gradually
be replaced with mechanized crop and livestock husbandry. Agricultural
transformation entails a transition that links smallholder farmers to a progressive
45
adoption of technologies, improving on/off-farm transportation, storage systems

and the increased use of irrigation as well as the development of high yielding
crop varieties and animal species.
Agricultural mechanization demands the creation of new institutions to
support mechanization and technological innovation to accelerate the
transformation drive. Mechanization also requires the educational system to be
technically oriented; universities, technical schools and specifically dedicated
training centers must become focused on skills creation. It is imperative to
establish Centers of Excellence and demonstration centers for agricultural
mechanization, for example, starting in Arsi and Bale where already farmers are
using tractors and combine harvesters. The Government must increase Research
and Development (R&D) funds significantly at all levels.
The Federal and Regional institutions must collaborate to train a new
generation of farmers who will be instrumental in rolling out agricultural
transformation. These trained farmers will perform a number of functions. They
will serve as technology-model farmers and provide advisory service to both
skilled and unskilled farmers, demonstrating that innovations are compatible with
farmers’ existing pool of knowledge. They can also provide agricultural
education to the youth at agricultural demonstration stations, possibly established
in each kebele farmers’ association area. They will in fact become agricultural
trainers and teachers.
Youth must be the major force of mechanization in agriculture,
participating in farming, being tractor operators, workshop service providers and
ensuring diligence and work preparedness. There is a need for mechanisms under
which existing farming populations can progressively improve their skills. It is
necessary to create a conducive environment for technical schools to produce a
skilled and industrious young workforce with a desire to work diligently in
agriculture.
Replacing the ox-plow and manual agricultural production practices with
mechanized systems is the sine qua non of agricultural transformation. The
experiences that we have referred to in the case of Bale, Arsi and other locations
where some mechanized agriculture has been employed must be expanded. The
first order of business of the Federal Government and Regional States, jointly
with private and in joint public-private partnerships, must be to identify where
tractor/harvester assembly plants and accessories, can be strategically located in
Ethiopia suitable to the soils and the terrain. During the initial period, however,
importing tractors and accessories, combine harvesters, milking machines,
hatcheries and incubators, enhanced storage systems, and other innovations must
be prioritized. Demonstration centers for agricultural mechanization, tractor and
combine harvester hiring stations should be established throughout the country.
All the stages of agricultural and rural transformation involve structural
changes, increases in household income and reduction in poverty. Transformation
46
in the agricultural sector has been recognized as having one of the largest impacts
on reducing poverty. In China, transformation in the agricultural sector is estimated
to have been 3.5 times more effective in reducing poverty than anything else. In
Latin America, the figure is 2.7 times. Successful rural transformation is, therefore,
the key to reducing poverty as a majority of the poor are to be found in rural areas.
Building on the successful experience of a quantitative growth of crops, and the
opportunities to expand the potential of the livestock sector, Ethiopia must now aim
to double, triple or even quadruple its present productivity levels by introducing
mechanization and other actions that will facilitate structural transformation. Labor
and land productivity, if combined with increasing utilization of mechanization and
other agricultural inputs, are the proven indicators of agricultural transformation. In
this sense, labor productivity is closely linked with household income and poverty
reduction.
4.5. Decisive Private Sector Lead in Agricultural and Rural

Transformation
Ethiopia’s smallholder farmers, and the private sector in agriculture, have
not been able to challenge heavy-handed Government interventions, especially
the legal and constitutional constraints and organizational inefficiencies. With
deregulation and explicit encouragement of the private sector in input and
technology supplies, supporting, for example, meat, milk and poultry value-
addition, it is feasible to transform the livestock sub-sector at scale and at speed,
making good use of the readily available information and in-depth analyses of the
sector.
Smallholder and new entrant private sector elements, can participate in
the production of national priority consumption crops, oilseeds, cotton, and pulse
crops. As incomes increase and wealth is created, farmers and private sector
investors will acquire the necessary financial means to invest in long-term measures
including mechanization, irrigation, afforestation and related activities. There will
be major opportunities for Ethiopia’s livestock transformation for private sector and
pastoralists benefitting from improved feed and veterinary services as well as
improved breeds. Improved networks of milk production and collection systems
will encourage smallholders in particular and ensure quality in supplying
commercial milk processing plants. There is an urgent need to modernize the milk
and meat processing technologies and increase the number of skilled dairy
processing and meat hygiene professionals and technicians. Incentives to encourage
investment in animal production and meat processing will go a long way to meet
increasing domestic demand for meat and milk, as well for to encourage export
promotion. Improvements in animal health services and animal genetics that takes
into account Ethiopia’s indigenous breeds, including Borana, Horo and other breeds
47
suitable for beef, should be put to work, offering immediate economic gains for
livestock owners and specialty markets. Animal feed industries must be supported
and expanded, commensurate with the growing demands for animal protein and
animal products.
4.6 Effective and Accountable Organizational Capacity

An immediate priority for organizational reform must be deregulation of
the prevailing systems of agricultural input supplies, especially seeds, fertilizers,
pesticides, herbicides, supplies of tractors and accessories, combine harvesters,
and others. The roles of the federal government and regional states must be clearly
defined. Motivating youth with skills training, providing start-up capital and
similar steps, will serve the dual objectives of employment creation and nurturing
mechanization service centers. Equally important is to consider a rollout for
application of Internet and big data, based on a system that was developed to
report tree planting in July 2019, to allow for accurate estimate of the demands
for agricultural inputs, spatially and temporally.
It is important to put in place governance arrangements to harness
synergies among government institutions, private sector actors, technologists,
farmers and research institutions. Effective and accountable institution al rules
and regulations, policies, programs and financial arrangements are necessary to
support agricultural transformation as well as a dedicated organization to
spearhead the transformation agenda. A structure of governance for
transformation must be organized at Federal and Regional State level - consisting
of politicians, policymakers, relevant ministries including agricultural,
technologists, business partners, investors and others with interests and expertise
in agricultural transformation. This governance structure must oversee conflict
between traditional elements and the emerging, and progressive, institutions
which will provide a transformational force. The key task is managing the
paradoxes between the old and the new, and supporting innovative ways of doing
business. Most importantly, one must be aware of the emergence and
empowerment of diverse interest groups. One example of this was the elite
elements who promoted the land grab around Addis Ababa and other major cities
without adequately or proportionately compensating farmers. This underlines the
necessity of having a legal mechanism in place for land valuation and to protect
farmers from forced eviction.
4.7 Accessible Rural and Agricultural Financial, Credit Services

and Incentives
Another priority function of the Federal and Regional States must be the
creation of decentralized agricultural and rural credit banks and financial services.
For policy changes to be effective and deliver on the promises of the
48
transformation agenda, it is critical to put in place effective and decentralized

financial structures in the form of agricultural and rural development banks.
Smart subsidies and price incentives should be directed to strategic commodities
that meet federal and regional priorities. These are preconditions for meeting
food, manufacturing and service sector demands. They may also include cereal
crops, maize, sorghum, wheat, teff, or barley, and pulses and oilseeds, aiming to
satisfy domestic consumption as well as replace imports. Equally important,
incentive systems must also prioritize the needs of the manufacturing sector,
especially the principal commodities needed by the Industrial Parks and agro-
processing plants. Those include cotton production for textiles, the livestock
sector for meat and milk production, and hides and skin to supply leather
manufacturing.
It is also important to reconsider the effect of the current imported wheat
subsidy. Subsidizing wheat millers has been acting as price disincentive to local
producers. An alternative subsidy approach could be to target bread consumers
using income thresholds. Similarly, incentives for the production of oilseed crops
would help to encourage greater domestic production of oilseeds and replace
imported vegetable oils. Special and preferential price incentives must be
considered to encourage the production of high-value nutrition crops and import-
substitution crops, for example for wheat, oilseeds, and cotton.
Another step would be to sequence and prioritize incentives for
agricultural and rural transformation by using farmers who have shown
themselves ready to innovate. This could include selective incentive schemes that
motivate existing capacities, individuals and farm household decisions to invest
in modernization of agriculture and rural life. For example, there are a number of
farmers, especially in Arsi and Bale areas, who have already accumulated
experience in using tractors and combine harvesters and have started land
aggregation. With targeted and sufficient incentives, they could quickly become
agents of agricultural and rural transformation. New entrants to agriculture and
rurally based agro-processing enterprises could also be prioritized through credit
systems, technical training/ assistance, subsidies and tax exemption.
4.8. Environmental Sustainability

The most critical element of property rights discussed above is to ensure
and enact legal basis to delineate and protect the natural environment, highly
degraded areas, and the critical watersheds that feed into Ethiopia’s numerous
hydro-power plants, including the river basins that are severely endangered. The
reservoir of Ethiopia’s watershed and environmental systems is close to being
broken irreparably. Farm size aggregation and employment of technology can
finally start to slow down, and turn around, the current and continuing human-
induced environmental deterioration, destruction of soils and vegetation….But
49
urgent action is needed to prevent crossing the threshold beyond which lies the
collapse of the country’s very structure and civilization.
50
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Agricultural and Rural Transformation in

Obstacles, Triggers and Reform Considerations

Policy Working Paper 01/2020

We can do anything we want –provided we can find a way. We are

This discussion paper assesses the state of agricultural and rural

and individual level in health, education and standard of living

Agriculture reports3 that agriculture contributes 27.5 billion dollars or 34.1% to

2. Challenges of Agricultural and Rural Transformation in

USAID contracted through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)4. Completed in

According to the Government’s self-assessment of the GTP I

The EPRDF government has also experimented with a number of policies

2.2. Obstacles to Agricultural and Rural Transformation in

The Rising Tide of Hunger and Poverty

Figure 1: Emergency and Safety Net Program Beneficiaries: 1978 – 2017

Source: Author, based on the NDRMC and MOA data.

Source: Author, based on the FAOSTAT data.

Input and Output Price Constraints

7 WIDE – Wellbeing Illbeing Dynamics in Ethiopia - is an ongoing longitudinal study of 20

Property Right Dilemma

businesses, and entrepreneurs offer no system of coordination and collaboration

Table 1: Number of Holders by Land size (ha) - 2014/2015

Organizational Inefficiencies and Incoherence

Fearful of the Creative Destruction

patterns-implications-and-challenges/, accessed May 2019.

of agriculture is elevated, not diminished, taking the commanding role in the

2.4. Agricultural Growth without Transformation

The Crop Sub-sector

Figure 3: Selected Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/2018

25.0 Maize Maize Wheat

Source: Author, based on the CSA data.

Principal cereal crop performance is highlighted below:

Pulse Crop Production

In sum, Ethiopia has the potential to substantially increase pulse crop

Figure 4: Selected Pulse Crop Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18

Pulses Field peas Lentils

Source: Author, based on the CSA data.

Oilseeds production (Graph 6)

Figure 5: Selected Oil Seeds Yield/ha: 1979/80 - 2017/18

2.0 Neug Neug

Source: Author, based on the CSA data.

The Livestock Sub-sector

As Table 4 shows, there is a considerable livestock resource in Ethiopia

Table 3: Livestock ownership in Pastoral Areas, 2014/2015

Table 4: Total Livestock Resources of Ethiopia, 2014/15

Afar 1,580,313 1,665,727 3,149,351 377 124,787 434,291 132,215 2,360

Somali 645,166 1,296,412 1,903,891 221 136,159 353,124 162,884 1,351

Gambela 278,584 35,476 88,610 683 25 846 307,387 55,502

Harari 62,401 6,287 57,624 773 11,445 4,363 71,419 1,291

The FAO’s study makes it clear that agro-industrial by-products could

pastoral systems, and highland crop-livestock mixed systems, both rainfall

3. Framing the Processes of Agricultural and Rural

Figure 6: Processes of Agricultural & Rural Transformation: Triggers,

Simultaneously, and as systemic triggers are acted upon, collective action

produce either in-kind or in cash or through purchase of risk insurance, if

3.2. Agricultural and Rural Transformation in Development

production, greater use of purchased inputs, greater resource flows to farming,

should not be the ultimate goal of agricultural transformation. This must be

sectors, without agricultural product derivatives, will be smaller relative to

3.3 Triggers of Agricultural and Rural Transformation

agriculturally-based economies find themselves in, that the process of structural