Smallholder farmers in Africa South of the Sahara often experience low yields, and efforts to increase them have sprouted throughout the continent. Yet many farmers fail to adopt modern inputs or farming techniques that would increase productivity because of several constraints, including lack of available technology, limited liquidity, high perceived risk, constrained access to information, and poorly functioning output markets.
Initiating reforms given this background is a slow process. Any new intervention to address these concerns, however, dramatically raises the expectations of national governments, and undervalues the modest but significant gains such interventions typically realize.
Ethiopia provides a clear example of agricultural underperformance, as the country’s wheat production has consistently lagged other African countries. In 2012, Ethiopia’s wheat yields were 29 percent below neighboring Kenya, 13 percent below the African average, and 32 percent below the global average.
To help address these shortcomings, Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency introduced the Wheat Initiative in 2013, a package intervention program designed to boost wheat yields through improved inputs and procurement. In recent IFPRI research published in Agricultural Economics, we examined the impact of the Wheat Initiative on farmers’ yields. The findings provide important lessons for how programs can boost yields in underperforming areas.
The Wheat Initiative provided a package of three broad interventions to 2,000 farmers across 41 woredas, or districts, in the four major wheat producing regions in Ethiopia. Interventions included better access to improved inputs such as certified wheat seed, fertilizers, and gypsum to improve soil structure; and enhanced techniques focused on lowering seeding rates, row planting, and balanced fertilizer use. In addition, it included a government commitment to buy farmers’ wheat at or above the market rate to reduce marketing risk to farmers.
The Initiative first worked with lead farmers—identified risk-takers receptive to new ideas, technologies, and practices—to promote the new package; then other farmers would learn about both types of inputs and techniques to improve wheat productivity.
To measure the impact of the Wheat Initiative, 504 potential lead farmers were randomly sorted into three separate groups: One received the entire package program, one accepted market assistance only, and the last was a control group. All three were informed of the recommended new techniques and inputs, but only one group received them at a subsidized rate.
We found that the group that received the full package program had a 14 percent increase in yields. If the same package were adopted by all of the country’s wheat farmers, and average gains remained the same, aggregate wheat production in Ethiopia would rise by 600 thousand metric tons—nearly the size of Ethiopia’s entire net wheat imports!
While these findings represented a significant positive change, this growth was smaller than the Ethiopian government’s expectation of doubling yields. However, it is likely the difference between expectations and actual results may underestimate the true degree of change associated with these technologies because of incomplete adoption of the recommended practices. For example, 39 percent of farmers chose not to adopt row planting completely, due to the implicit cost of additional labor to row plant. Boosting the use of new material inputs when they are made available is not particularly difficult; changing farmer behavior takes significantly more time.
Nonetheless, the study offers important lessons for both intervention design and policy. One drawback of using a package approach—an intervention with several components—is the difficulty in determining which is the true catalyst for yield improvements.
Overall, the findings represent a substantial improvement in wheat production and the potential for broad gains. The key is for governments or other practitioners to remain engaged, spreading interventions like this one, while taking a long-term perspective for these interventions to bear fruit.
Gashaw Tadesse Abate is a Research Coordinator; Tanguy Bernard and Alan de Brauw are Senior Research Fellows; and Nicholas Minot is the Deputy Division Director of IFPRI’s Markets, Trade and Institutions Division. Elena Hildebrandt is an IFPRI Communications Intern. This post first appeared on the Thomson-Reuters Foundation News site.
Source – IFPRI Blog
