repeated famine problems engendered in the country has been attributed at least partly ... Ethiopia and particularly nothing in the Eastern Highlands of Ethiopia. The main ... groups, vegetables and spices like, potato, shallots, and red pepper.
Symposium no. 06
Paper no. 1747
Presentation: poster
Adoption of soil and water conservation measures (SWCM) by subsistence farmers in the Eastern Ethiopia BEKELE Wagayehu and DRAKE Lars Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Economics, Box 7013, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden Abstract Problems related to soil erosion have been receiving more and more attention in recent years, especially in developing countries. Attention to be given to the problem, however, may vary from country to country depending on the physical environment, importance of agriculture in the national economy and the level of technology applied in the sector. Agriculture in Ethiopia is the dominant economic sector upon which the vast majority of the population directly or indirectly depends. This sector is characterized by small-scale subsistence agriculture based on traditional techniques and implements incapable of preventing soil losses due to erosion to any tolerable level. Soil and water conservation is, therefore, among the top priority areas of intervention to insure food security and improve living conditions of fast growing rural population. Methods of intervention should, however, depend upon knowledge of various personal, physical, economic and institutional factors that influence farmers’ conservation decisions. This understanding could prove useful in the formulation and implementation of policy programs to induce voluntary uptake by farmers. This paper is based on a survey conducted in the Western Hararghe Zone of Eastern Ethiopian Highlands. Within this study area 145 farm households were randomly selected and individual interviews, using a semi-structured questionnaire, were conducted. Multinomial logit analysis of survey data shows that farmers’ adoption of conservation measures is positively related to their ranking of soil erosion problem, wealth status, support programs for initial investment, and participation of women in fieldwork activities. Farmers’ ranking of the problem itself is significantly influenced by access to credit and the topography of plots. Large family size is negatively correlated while land tenure system was not shown to affect conservation decisions. These results suggest a need for wide range of policies and programs for intervention. Keywords: Ethiopia, erosion, adoption, soil and water conservation Introduction The Ethiopian agricultural economy, which is the main stay of the vast majority of its population, is under continuous threat from various forms of land degradation. Among these, soil erosion by water remains to be the most important and an ominous threat to the nation’s future prospects. Ethiopia has been referred to as being among the most serious soil erosion areas in the world (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie et al., 1987) and the repeated famine problems engendered in the country has been attributed at least partly
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to this phenomenon (Blaikie, 1985; Hurni, 1988, 1993). Problems related to soil erosion have been receiving more and more attention in recent years, especially in developing countries. The emphasis placed on the importance of the problem, however, may vary from country to country depending on the importance of agriculture in the national economy and the level of technology applied in the sector. Agriculture is the most dominant economic sector upon which the vast majority of Ethiopian population directly or indirectly depends. The farming system is characterized by small-scale subsistence agriculture based on traditional techniques and implements incapable of preventing soil losses due to erosion to any tolerable level. Soil erosion in Ethiopia is not a new phenomenon, it is as old as the history of agriculture itself, but the problem attracted the attention of policy makers only after the devastating famine problem in 1773/74 (Shiferaw et al., 1998). This coincided with, and in some way contributed to the change of socio-economic order in the country. Prior to 1974, the conservation of agricultural land was largely neglected due to the singular dominance given to industrial growth over agriculture. In the wake of the 1985 famine, the Ethiopian government launched an ambitious program of soil and water conservation supported by donors and non-government organizations and backed up by the largest food-for-work program in Africa (Hoben, 1996). During this massive mobilization of resources, the Eastern Ethiopian Highlands have also been targeted (Asrat et al., 1996). However, these programs have been reported to neither succeed in triggering the adoption of voluntary conservation practice among farmers outside the project area, nor in preserving the structures constructed under the incentives of the project (Admassie, 1995). It is therefore pertinent to understand the factors that influence the adoption of soil and water conservation by farmers. This understanding could prove useful in the formulation and implementation of policy programs to induce voluntary uptake by farmers. It is difficult to generalize about the determinants of the adoption of soil and water conservation technologies in different parts of the world because of the differences in agro-ecological and socioeconomic settings under which farmers operate. Farmers in some parts of the world look for practices to substitute for slash-and-burn shifting cultivation system (Adesina, 2000). Others compare capital versus management intensive technology alternatives (Zepeda, 1990), while the concern for some is about the adoption and use of computer by farmers (Baker, 1992). The principal economic rationality assumption, the utility maximization objective of farmers, might be the same for all. The specific attributes influencing the adoption decision are, however, far from uniform. Adoption of soil and water conservation practices may, therefore, depend upon theses differences many of which are specific to a particular region, village, household, or plot. Research into the determinants of conservation investment represents a meager proportion of literatures on factors affecting farmer technology adoption. Furthermore, the limited research activities conducted in the area treat the conservation technology adoption decision as a binomial choice decision process, whether a farmer adopted a recommended technology or not. This undermined the importance of the adoption of some traditional and modified types of conservation measures by farmers. References could only be made to Shiferaw et al. (1998), Admassie (1995) and Alemu (1999), for soil and water conservation adoption related studies in a few areas of the Northern and
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Central Highlands of Ethiopia. Except for these, not much has been done so far in Ethiopia and particularly nothing in the Eastern Highlands of Ethiopia. The main aim of this study is, therefore, to determine the major factors influencing farmers’ adoption decision and draw conclusions that might help in the design and implementation of intervention policy and programs. Table 1 Socio-economic characteristics farm households in Hunde-Lafto area. Per-cent of total Standard Characteristics Mean households Deviation Family size
-
6.43
2.41
Landholding in “Timad”*
-
5.78
2.70
No. Of cattle heads
-
2.42
1.75
No ox
40
-
-
One ox
38
-
-
Two or more oxen
22
-
-
None at all
44
-
-
1 – 3 years
26
-
-
4 – 6 years
17
-
-
> 6 years
13
-
-
71
-
-
Oxen holding:
Formal Education:
Ethnic Group: Oromo (majority)
Amhara (minority) 29 Source: Own survey, 2000 *Timad is a local area measure for cultivable land. It is equal to an area of land plowed per day with a pair of oxen. One Timad is equal to 1/7 – 1/8 Hectare (Galizia, 1986). Materials and Methods The study area This paper is based on a survey conducted, during July and August 2000, in the Hunde-Lafto area, which is part of the Western Hararghe Zone of the Oromiya Regional State. The Eastern Ethiopian highlands in general and the study area in particular are among the areas that have severe land degradation problems in the country (Figure 1). Hunde-Lafto is located at about 350 km east of the capital city of Ethiopia, AddisAbeba, and 20 km North of the Zonal town Chiro, along the main road to Harar and Dire-Dawa. The area has an undulated type of landscape with convex shaped interfluves, V-shaped valleys, and steep to very steep hills. It has a slope gradient ranging from nearly flat valley bottoms to more than 50 degree steep hillsides (Tolcha, 1991). About 47% of the soil in the area has shallow to very shallow depth while the rest could be characterized as having deep to very deep soil. The most important soils in
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the area, in terms of coverage of arable land, are vertisols, cambisols, and fluvisols, with vertisols covering the biggest part (Bono et al., 1983). The area has a bimodal rainfall distribution, with the small rainy season from March - May and the main rainy season from July - September.
1 = Extreme land degradation (80% of soil only about 20 cm deep). 2 = Very serious (60-80%) 3 = High (40-50%) 4 = medium (20-40%) 5 = Slight (less than 20%) Source: Adopted from Hurni (1988) Figure 1 Map of Ethiopia indicating severity levels of soil erosion and location of thestudy area. Agriculture in the area could be characterized as a small-scale subsistence mixed farming-system, where livestock production is an integral part. Sorghum-MaizeHaricot beans (S-M-H) intercropping, that is typical of the Eastern Ethiopian Highlands, dominates the cropping system. About 21% of the sample farmers practice only the SM-H mix type of cropping system; about 45% of them include small cereals (barley and wheat) and some highland pulses and oil-seeds (field peas, horse-beans, lentils, linseed,
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fenugreek and chick pea). The rest, about 34%, include, in addition to the above two groups, vegetables and spices like, potato, shallots, and red pepper. Farmers have different levels of resource endowments (Table 2) that shape their farming practices and potentially affect their agricultural technology adoption behavior. Table 2 Definition of Variables and values that variables are taking. Variable Definition Variable values ADOPTION Adopted type of soil and conservation 0 = no SWC structure at all, 1 = adopted traditional measure water structures, 2 = adopted modified structures, and 3 = adopted recommended structure FAMILY Number of family members 1 = 1 – 4 family members, 2 = 5 – 7 family members, and 3 = ≥ 8 family members PLOT Number of plots owned Numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4. RANK Rank of soil erosion problem. 0 = less serious than other problems, 1 = as serious as other problems 2 = more serious than other problems. WOMEN Women participate in fieldwork 0 = no, 1 = yes WEALTH Wealth group of the farm r 0 = lower wealth group, 1 = medium wealth group, and 2 = higher wealth group. ASSIST Got assistance for conservation 0 = no, 1 = yes CROP Major crops grown 1 =sorghum-maize-haricot bean only, 2 = 1 + small cereals and high land pulses and oilseeds, 3 = 1+ 2 + vegetables. NATION Nationality of household head 0 = Minority ethnic group, 1 = Majority ethnic group. DEVIATE Deviation in land holding Difference holding in Timad*…,-2,-1,0,1,2, in area of per economicall active land LAND Cultivable land holding area of cultivable land in Timad* 1, 2, 3,…,17 SLOPE Slope of plots as perceived by 1 = flat, 2 = gentle sloping, 3 = sloping, 4 = very farmers sloping SOIL Soil type by color 1 = black, 2 = brown, 3 = reddish, 4 = gray AGE Age of the household head 1 = < 40 years old, 2 = ≥ 40 < 60years old, and 3 = ≥ 60 years old DISTANCE Distance of the plot from home 1 = near, 2 = far, 3 = very far CREDIT Access to credit in case of need 0 = no, 1 = yes *Timad is a local area measure for cultivable land. It is equal to an area of land plowed per day with a pair of oxen. One Timad is equal to 1/7 – 1/8 hectare (SCRP, 1986).
The selected area has been one of the seven sites of the Soil Conservation Research Project (SCRP) conducted by the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) in collaboration with the University of Berne, Switzerland, since 1982. In addition to its on-station research activities, SCRP had also constructed on-farm soil conservation structures in the Hunde-Lafto sub-catchments and treated it as one “experimental unit” for data generation. The activities of this project has generated important amount of onstation and on-farm data and information on the performance of different types of soil conservation measures. This has been the basis for selecting the site for our study Theoretical model An adoption decision by farmers is inherently a multivariate one, and attempting bivariate modeling excludes useful economic information contained in an interdependent and simultaneous adoption decisions (Dorfman, 1996). Adoption of soil and water conservation measures is a multiple choices decision.
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Both probit and logit analysis are well-established approaches in the literature focusing on adoption of technology (Burton et al., 1999) and whether, to use probit or logit model is a matter of computational convenience. The logit model has been widely used in many fields, including economics (Greene, 1997). A multinomial logit model has been chosen for this study. The model enables the determination of the factors influencing soil and water conservation in the context of individually specific data on multiple choices. In this method, farmers are classified according to their status at the time of being surveyed, and the distribution of farmers among groups is explained in terms of the characteristics of the farmer and farm attributes. The same model is also used to study factors influencing farmers’ ranking of soil erosion problem among other agricultural problems. The logit model can be used to estimate a utility maximization problem where the farmer is assumed to have preference defined over a set of technology alternatives: Uj = βj’Xi + εj Where Uj is utility of technology j, Xi a vector of attributes of the farm and the farmer, βj a parameter to be estimated and εj the disturbance term. The disturbances term are assumed to be independently and identically distributed. If the farmer’s choice is alternative j this means that, Uij > Uik , ∀ k ≠ j Where Uij is the utility to the ith farmer of technology j, and Uik the utility to the ith farmer of technology k. When each technology is thought of as a possible adoption decision by the farmer, the farmer will be expected to choose the technology that maximizes his expected utility (Dorfman, 1996; Zepeda, 1990). Since there is a finite set of possible technologies to choose from, the ith individual decision may be modeled as maximizing the expected utility of the present value of profit (net return) by choosing the jth technology from among the J discrete technologies. Max J { E (U (π ij )) = f j ( X i ) + ε ij , j = 0,..., J
}
Where πij is the ith farm household profit from jth technology and fj is a function of Xi = (Xi1, …, Xin ), which is a (1 x n) vector of attributes of the ith farmer that potentially affect the desirability of a technology. Following Greene (1997) and Burton et al. (1999), the multinomial logit, for multiple-choice problem, is taking the form: Pr( y = j ) =
e
β j Xi
e β 0 X i + e β1 X i + ... + e β J X i
Where J = 0, 1, 2, 3, is representing the alternative conservation measures, Xi is a vector of attributes of the ith farmer and βj is a vector of parameters estimated using the maximum likelihood procedures. The data are analyzed using LIMDEP econometric soft ware. Empirical model The survey This survey covered the whole Agucho catchments, in which the Hune-Lafto subcatchments are located, and some parts of an adjacent catchment. Within this study area
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145 farm households were randomly selected and individual interviews using a semistructured questionnaire were conducted. Prior to the formal survey, using questionnaires, an informal survey involving individual and groups discussion with farmers and key informants was also conducted. The information collected in the informal survey helped to guide the formal questionnaire development. The questionnaire was used to train the enumerators who conducted the interview together with the researcher. The questions included in the interview covered a wide range of household and farm characteristics that could be grouped into social, economic and physical aspects. Some of the questions related to farm production and household income seemed to be sensitive and generated inconsistent information that were not used in the analysis. The choices This study deals only with soil and water conservation measures that involve a construction of physical structures on farmers' plots to reduce run-off and resultant soil loss. Alternative soil and water conservation measures considered in this study include, no conservation structure at all, traditional soil conservation structures, modified type of recommended structure, and a recommended type of structure (Table 2). The recommended type structure refers to the construction and maintenance of level bunds (soil bunds and/or stone bunds). This has been widely constructed by Food-For-Fork (FFW) program and SCRP in the study area and other parts of the country. Farmers in this group are those farmers who had the structures built on their plot by SCRP or FFW program and preserved them without modification, plus those farmers who constructed similar type of structure by their own initiative. The modified type refers to those practices in which farmers have constructed level bunds with their own preferred length, spacing and/or heights that are different from the recommended type. This group also include, farmers who had a structure constructed on their plot by SCRP or FFW programs and who partly removed those structures and retained part of it by adjusting them to their farm conditions. Traditional conservation measures include those indigenous practices of farmers involving the construction and layout of strips using crop residues and/or weeds. The conservation measures that are often overlooked in adoption studies are the traditional and modified type of structures. Farmers constructing simple traditional structures and modified structures have treated as non-adopters. However, farmers who adopt these conservation measures, traditional or modified, display a higher level of problem perception as well as effectiveness in combating the problem than the nonadopters. There are studies suggesting the existence of well-developed traditional conservation practices in the Eastern Highlands of Ethiopia (Asrat et al., 1996; Tolcha, 1991) and in other parts of the country as well (Admassie, 1995; Alemayehu, 1996; Kruger et al., 1996). The problem of adoption of recommended conservation measures is some times attributed to the lack of consideration of traditional practices that evolved over time and suited to farmers’ circumstances and the farming systems. Variables explaining adoption The measure of adoption used in this study is the actual existence of conservation structures on the farmers' plots. The choice of explanatory variables in adoption studies has often lacked a firm theoretical basis. This is because economic theories do not provide a strong basis to determine the factors affecting soil conservation behavior
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(Norris et al., 1987). Moreover, in adoption process farmers pay attention not only to economic incentives but also to a variety of non-economic factors (Drake et al., 1999). This means that while farmer’s probability of adoption can be estimated from his utility maximization behavior, the arguments of the utility function are difficult to determine. Past research have related farmer’s adoption behavior to various personal, physical, economic and/or institutional factors. The attributes of the farmer and the farm considered for this study are listed and explained in Table 2. Studies by Ervin et al. (1982) and Norris (1987) suggest that perception of soil erosion problem is the first step in the adoption process and thus is positively correlated with farmers’ adoption decision. Similar result has also been reported from the Central Highlands of Ethiopia (Shiferaw et al., 1998). In this study, perception of soil erosion problem is represented by the farmers’ ranking of the seriousness of the soil erosion problem among the hierarchy of other agricultural problems. It is hypothesized that the ranking positively influence farmers’ soil conservation decision. Out of eight villages covered by the survey, one village, got assistance for the construction of conservation structures from SCRP, four villages received assistance from Food for Work (FFW) program, and the rest three villages got no assistance at all. It has been suggested that assistance programs for construction of soil conservation structures in Ethiopia was not a success story due to the fact that those structures were totally or partially removed by farmers after the introduction of economic reform program in 1990 and further liberalization of the economy since then (Admassie, 1995; Hoben, 1996). A survey by Shiferaw et al. (1998), in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia, also indicated that about 53% of the farmers in the area completely removed the structures and about 31% of them partially removed the structures. The reason for removal of the structures has been attributed, in most cases, to the lack of participation of farmers in their design and implementation and hence lack of integration of the structures into the farming system practiced. Regardless of this, high initial investment in terms of labor requirement that is not affordable by many subsistence farmers remains to be one of the major obstacles for adopting soil conservation measures. We, therefore, hypothesize that assistance to cover the initial investment cost for conservation structures has a positive influence on conservation behavior of farmers. Policy environment, particularly the land tenure policy in Ethiopia, is one where land is owned by the state and any form of exchange of land is prohibited and land redistributions are frequent. This type of environment deprives farmers of a sense of ownership and is negatively correlated with conservation adoption. Results reported by Admassie (1995) and Alemu (1999) from the Northern and Central highlands of Ethiopia confirms the same. Pender et al. (1998) and Anderson et al. (1990) have also reported similar findings. Ethiopia, historically, had a very complicated land tenure system due to the multiplicity of tenure systems that existed before 1975 (Akalu, 1982). Under the current federal system of government, different regional states have also shown different levels of intervention in the land tenure arrangement. It is, therefore, difficult to generalize about the effect of this variable on conservation across the country. In this study the effect of the land tenure system on the adoption of soil and water conservation is represented by three variables: (1) farmers reply to whether or not sense of land tenure insecurity affect their decision to investment in conservation; (2) the adoption behavior of farmers from the minority ethnic group; and (3) the effect of
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deviation in land holding from the area’s average per economically active household member land holding. We hypothesized that the response of farmers would confirm that the current land tenure arrangement has negative relationship with investment in soil and water conservation in the study area. If there are tenure insecurity concerns, farmers from the minority group are expected to practice less soil conservation (Norris et al., 1987). It is, therefore, hypothesized that nationality is positively correlated to conservation adoption. Other things being equal, households with large positive deviation from the village mean per capita land holdings are less likely to adopt soil conservation (Alemu, 1999). Therefore, deviation in land holding from the area’s average per economically active household members holding is expected to have negative correlation with adoption decision. The decision behavior to adopt conservation technologies is also attributed to market failures due to imperfect information. As discussed by Pender (1998), under a perfect market condition conservation investment is unaffected by the farmer’s endowments of labor or other productive assets including land. Under the condition of perfect credit market and missing labor market, households with a larger labor endowment invest more in soil conservation because of low opportunity cost of labor. But when both labor and credit markets are missing the result is not certain (Pender 1998). This later case is a matching characteristic of our study area where both credit and labor markets are far from perfect. However, we still hypothesize that family size (which is also a close proxy of economically active household members) is positively correlated with conservation adoption because of the low opportunity cost of labor in rural areas. It is generally believed that wealthier people are willing to bear more risk than poor people. According to Norris et al. (1987) larger farm size is associated with greater wealth and increased availability of capital, which makes investment in conservation more feasible. Wealth status of a farmer, as approximated by the number of cattle heads owned, the total area of cultivable land, and the food production status, is hypothesized to have positive correlation with conservation adoption in the study area. Given a certain area of land holding, larger number of plots implies fragmentation of land such that proportionally more area of land will be taken by the conservation structures. This proportion of land area taken by the conservation structure might offset benefits from soil conservation on such plots. Considering the small cultivable land holding in the study area, we hypothesize that the number of plots owned by farmers is negatively correlated with conservation adoption. In many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, women are part of the primary labor force (Akerman, 1995), heading about a third of rural households and contribute as much as 70% of household food production. In our study area, however, women’s major role is in household and childcare activities. Men are heads of households and are responsible for fieldwork activities of the farm. As a result men make decisions concerning fieldwork activities while women make decisions concerning household and childcare. Women, however, assist in a range of fieldwork activities. Yield increasing agricultural technologies, like soil and water conservation, are often labor intensive. The additional labor requirement engendered by such technologies is some times met by involving women labor in fieldwork activities. This involvement in fieldwork activities may result in some share for decision making that serves as an “invisible hand” to influence
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conservation decision. We, therefore, hypothesize that the involvement of women in fieldwork activities has a positive correlation with the adoption of soil and water conservation technology. It has been suggested (Laper, 1996) that policy support to increase farm production, as well as to encourage switching from low-value subsistence crops to high-value cash crops would improve the return to investment in soil conservation. Farmers who diversify production and include high value cash crops are able to offset the risk of crop failure and hence face less financial and subsistence constraints. We hypothesize that the crop diversification including cash crops is positively related to conservation behavior of farmers. The total cultivable land holding of the farm household is used as a weighing variable in the analysis, in order to make the results represent land area rather than farm households. Results and Discussion Farmers in the study area seem to have some understanding of the problem of soil erosion and soil stabilizing effects of conservation measures. Their replies were unanimously positive to the questions concerning knowledge about yield reducing effect of soil erosion and the benefit of soil and water conservation. This could not be a surprise after more than two decades of on-farm soil and water conservation research activities and development efforts in the study area. The degree of importance placed on the problem and the understanding about the urgency of intervention needed vary from farmer to farmer depending on differences in farm circumstances. The real adoption behavior of farmers is influenced by these differences (Table 3) that could be classified as physical, socio-economic and institutional. Against the hypothesized situation, family size emerged to have negative correlation with conservation adoption. This may be explained by the relation between larger family size and high demand for food in the household. For a given land-man ratio, households with larger families seem to accept less risk in experimenting with new technologies (Shiferaw, 1998). Other explanation could be found in the competition for labor between consumption and investment in soil conservation. Human labor endowment is the most important variable capital of small-scale farmers in the study area. Other important assets like land holding are not distributed proportional to family size. In such conditions, households with larger families are more likely to face food shortage. Hence, the available economically active labor force will be employed in food generating activities such as daily labor work, for other farmers or in near by villages, instead of undertaking soil conservation measures on the family farm. This means even during slack labor seasons, when work on conservation structures could be undertaken, the opportunity cost of labor for households with more mouths to feed will be higher, despite imperfect labor market situations
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Table 3 Multinomial logit results for the adoption of different types of soil conservation measures in Hunde-Lafto area. TRADITIONAL Coef Std.Err P-value FAMILY -2.258 0.900 0.012* (-2.509) PLOT 0.368 0.599 0.539 (0.615) RANK 2.166 0.776 0.005** (2.790) WOMEN 1.353 0.879 0.124 (1.540) WEALTH 2.965 1.080 0.006** (2.747) ASSIST 0.258 1.157 0.824 (0.223) CROP 0.884 0.652 0.175 (1.355) NATION -3.073 1.342 0.022* (-2.290) DEVIATE -0.861 0.394 0.029* (-2.184) Dependent Variable Weighing variable Number of observations Log likelihood function Restricted log likelihood function Chi-squared Significance level VARIABLE
1 a
Figures in parenthesis are T-ratios Significant at < 0.1, * Significant at
