The perception of Ethiopia projected in the media is often one of chronic poverty and hunger, but this bleak assessment does not accurately reflect most of the country today. Ethiopia encompasses a wide variety of agroecologies and peoples. Its agriculture sector, economy, and food security status are equally complex. In fact, since 2001 the per capita income in certain rural areas has risen by more than 50 percent, and crop yields and availability have also increased. Higher investments in roads and mobile phone technology have led to improved infrastructure and thereby greater access to markets, commodities, services, and information. In Food and Agriculture in Ethiopia: Progress and Policy Challenges, Paul Dorosh and Shahidur Rashid, along with other experts, tell the story of Ethiopia's political, economic, and agricultural transformation. The book is designed to provide empirical evidence to shed light on the complexities of agricultural and food policy in today's Ethiopia, highlight major policies and interventions of the past decade, and provide insights into building resilience to natural disasters and food crises. It examines the key issues, constraints, and opportunities that are likely to shape a food-secure future in Ethiopia, focusing on land quality, crop production, adoption of high-quality seed and fertilizer, and household income. Students, researchers, policy analysts, and decisionmakers will find this book a useful overview of Ethiopia's political, economic, and agricultural transformation as well as a resource for major food policy issues in Ethiopia. Contributors: Dawit Alemu, Guush Berhane, Jordan Chamberlin, Sarah Coll-Black, Paul Dorosh, Berhanu Gebremedhin, Sinafikeh Asrat Gemessa, Daniel O. Gilligan, John Graham, Kibrom Tafere Hirfrfot, John Hoddinott, Adam Kennedy, Neha Kumar, Mehrab Malek, Linden McBride, Dawit Kelemework Mekonnen, Asfaw Negassa, Shahidur Rashid, Emily Schmidt, David Spielman, Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, Seneshaw Tamiru, James Thurlow, William Wiseman.

Ethiopia encompasses a wide variety of agroecologies and peoples.

Free trade promotes economic growth through international competition and the efficient allocation of resources while also helping to stabilize food supplies between countries that have an overabundance of product and countries that have a shortage. However, sudden price surges can threaten the social cohesion of developing countries and may lead to malnutrition and stunted growth. Balancing trade liberalization and protectionism is imperative for the provision of food security for all. The Handbook of Research on Globalized Agricultural Trade and New Challenges for Food Security is an essential publication that seeks to improve food security, food independence, and food sovereignty in the conditions of globalized agricultural trade and addresses the contemporary issues of agricultural trade including major commodities and food products traded between major countries, directions of trade, and trends. The book also examines the effects of tariff escalations, administrative restrictions, other forms of trade protectionism on food security, and the emerging trade tensions between major actors such as the US, China, the EU, and Russia. Featuring research on topics including plant fertility, dietary diversity, and protectionism, this book is ideally designed for government officials, policymakers, agribusiness managers, stakeholders, international tradesmen, researchers, industry professionals, academicians, and students.

Overcoming Agricultural and Food Crises in Ethiopia is a sobering presentation of the crises of smallholder agriculture, food and nutrition, the environment and the impending threats to the survival and well-being of millions of Ethiopians and the nation. The combination of the obsolete systems on the one hand, with a growing young population, sustained decline of agricultural land per capita, unstructured urbanization and absence of rural industrialization on the other, presents a grim prospect for the contemporary Ethiopian state builders. The book seeks to call on political leaders, policymakers, scholars, business people, religious and moral authorities, farmers, and the general public to urgently mobilize bold vision and action to redress the crises.About the AuthorGetachew Diriba was born and raised in rural Ethiopia like most of his contemporaries. He graduated from Haramaya College of Agriculture, attended a post-graduate program at the University of Dortmund, Germany, and obtained a Doctoral degree in agricultural economics from the School of Development Studies of the University of East Anglia, the United Kingdom.He worked as extension program officer and Project Manager of the Kobo Alamata Agricultural Development Project in Northeastern Ethiopia; Program Manager for CARE Ethiopia; Regional Adviser for Southern and Eastern Africa for CARE International. He also worked for the United Nations World Food Program in Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping for the Southern, the Great Lakes, and the Central Africa Regions; Head of Program in the Republic of the Sudan, Regional Program Adviser for the Middle East and Central Europe, Director of the Partnerships and Capacity Development Service at Headquarters, Country Director and Representative in the Republic of Liberia, and Country Director and Representative in the People's Republic of China, in which he established the China Center of Excellence for WFP. He retired from WFP in early 2017.

For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers. This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the world. People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys, photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann’s five years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth, urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.

Despite a rapidly growing enthusiasm around applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to smallholder agriculture in developing countries, there are still many questions on the effectiveness of ICT-based approaches. This study assesses the effects of videomediated agricultural extension service provision on farmers’ knowledge and adoption of improved agricultural technologies and practices in Ethiopia. The study focuses on a program piloted by the Government of Ethiopia and Digital Green and poses three questions. First, to what extent does video-mediated extension lead to increased uptake of improved agricultural technologies and practices by smallholder farmers? Second, is video-mediated extension targeted at both spouses of the household more effective than when only targeted at the (typically male) household head? Third, how cost-effective is a video-mediated approach to extension provision? The study explores these questions with a randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate the video-mediated approach as applied to three priority crops (teff, wheat, maize) and three technologies (row planting, precise seeding rates, and urea dressing). The trial was implemented in 347 kebeles (village clusters) during the 2017 meher (rainy) season in Ethiopia’s four most agriculturally important regional states. Analysis of data from our surveys of 2,422 households and 896 extension agents indicates that the video-mediated approach is more effective than the conventional approach in achieving several key outcomes. Specifically, we find that videomediated extension reaches a wider audience than the conventional approach and leads to higher levels of agricultural knowledge and uptake of technologies in those kebeles randomly assigned to the program. While our results do point to greater participation and greater knowledge of female spouses in kebeles where both male and female spouses were targeted by the program, we do not find clear evidence that the more inclusive approach translated into higher uptake of the subject technologies and practices. Finally, we find that the video-mediated approach becomes less costly as the scale of operation increases.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.