Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, , language: English, abstract: Ethiopia is one of the Sub-Saharan Africa’s developing countries with a large potential in livestock, being 1st among African countries and 9th in the world. Dairying is one of the livestock production systems practiced in almost all over Ethiopia. The cattle population was estimated at about 50.9 million of which indigenous breeds accounted for 99.19 % while the rest is hybrids and pure exotic breeds. The main objective of this seminar is to review the challenges and opportunities of investment in dairy sector in Ethiopia. Dairy production in Ethiopia was mostly traditional and formal dairy production started in the early 1950s. In Ethiopia the three major production systems are: traditional smallholder; privatized state; and urban and peri-urban. Ethiopians consume less dairy products than per capita milk consumption and the country is not known to export dairy product and spent more money on importing milk and milk products. The livestock sector in general and the dairy sub-sector in particular do not make a substantial contribution to the national income, despite its large size, due to different challenges. The challenges are those attributed to demand and supply sides. Demand side includes population growth, seasonality of demand, low per capita consumption, low demand and high transaction costs. Supply side challenges can be: livestock population, animal health problem, feed and nutrition, low productivity and genetics, limited access and high cost of dairy heifers/cows, quality problem, collection problems, institutional concern, lack of technical support, inadequate extension and training services, lack of infrastructures, lack of access to land and lack of credit. This challenge lowers the investment activity in the sector in Ethiopia. Dairy sector investments have also different opportunities like huge resource base and potential for development, favorable conditions and potential for value chain development, huge increasing consumer demand for milk and dairy products, potential role in import substitution, conducive government policies, laws and regulations, income generation and employment opportunities and indigenous knowledge.

This paper explores the spatial heterogeneity in dairy production in the highland production area around the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. We look at how urban proximity – defined as the travel time from the farm to the central market of Addis Ababa – affects the production decisions of Ethiopian dairy farmers. We sampled 870 households from the major rural production zones around Addis Ababa, where villages were stratified according to their distance to Addis Ababa. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find evidence of strong spatial heterogeneity in dairy milk productivity in Ethiopia. With each additional hour of travel time, the milk productivity per cow is reduced by almost 1 liter per day, a reduction by 26 percent on average. This spatial heterogeneity in milk productivity reflects a pronounced spatial variation in dairy production decisions (producing liquid milk or processed dairy products), the application of modern inputs, and marketing. When trying to disentangle the mechanisms through which urban proximity affects dairy productivity, we show that the effect of travel time mainly runs through farmers’ inclusion into ‘modern’ value chains and more specifically through their access to commercial milk buyers. This finding holds when we control for prices, indicating that access to commercial value chains are an important determinant of dairy productivity. However, as only a limited number of farmers now have access to such value chains in these settings, measures to make dairy value chains more inclusive to remote farmers can have important economic development benefits for them.

The impact of food taboos – often because of religion – is understudied. In Ethiopia, religious fasting by Orthodox Christians is assumed to be an important impediment for the sustainable development of a competitive dairy sector and desired higher milk consumption, especially by children. However, evidence is limited. Relying on unique data, we shed light on three major issues. First, we observe that the average annual number of fasting days that Orthodox adults are effectively adhering to is 140, less than commonly cited averages. Using this as an estimate for extrapolation, fasting is estimated to reduce annual dairy consumption by approximately 12 percent nationally. Second, farms adapt to declining milk demand during fasting by increased processing of milk into storable products – fasting contributes to larger price swings for these products. We further note continued sales of milk by non-remote farmers and reduced production – by adjusting lactation times for dairy animals – for remote farmers. Third, fasting is mostly associated with increased milk consumption by the children of dairy farmers, seemingly because of excess milk availability during fasting periods. Our results suggest that fasting habits are not a major explanation for the observed poor performance of Ethiopia’s dairy sector nor low milk consumption by children. To reduce the impact of fasting on the dairy sector in Ethiopia further, investment is called for in improved milk processing, storage, and infrastructure facilities.