Devoting time to off-farm activities, while complementing agricultural incomes, may be constrained by labor availability and financial capacity. This paper assesses the importance of rainfall patterns, which condition the availability of agricultural labor, and financial constraints on off-farm employment decisions.

Dependency of urban Ethiopian households on rural areas for about 85 percent of their fuel needs is a significant cause of deforestation and forest degradation, resulting in growing fuel scarcity and higher firewood prices.

In this paper we use farmers' actual experiences with changes in rainfall levels and their responses to these changes to assess if patterns of fertilizer use are responsive to changes in rainfall patterns.

This paper investigates the opportunities for reducing the pressure of urban centers on rural forest areas, using a dataset of 350 urban households in Tigrai in northern Ethiopia.

This article uses data from household- and plot-level surveys conducted in the highlands of the Tigray and Amhara regions of Ethiopia. We examine the contribution of sustainable land management (SLM) practices to net value of agricultural production in areas with low vs. high agricultural potential.

This paper uses a farm level panel data from Ethiopia and a comprehensive empirical strategy to investigate the contribution of crop biodiversity on food production.

We find that increasing the number of crop variety increases production. This result is stronger when rainfall level is lower. Moreover, the productivity analysis is complemented with the study of the determinants of farm level crop biodiversity. Empirical results suggest that rainfall, tenure security and household endowments tend to govern crop diversity decisions at the farm level.

The Ethiopian economy has its foundation in the agricultural sector. This sector continues to be a fundamental instrument for poverty alleviation, food security, and fueling economic growth. However, the sector continues to be undermined by land degradation (LD) in the form of depletion of soil organic matter, soil erosion, and lack of adequate plant-nutrient supply (Pender et al., 2006).

This paper evaluates the ex-post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and rural poverty in rural Uganda. The study utilizes cross-sectional farm household data collected in 2006 in seven districts of Uganda.

Land degradation is a major problem undermining land productivity in the highlands of Ethiopia. This study explores the factors that affect farm households’ decisions at the plot level to invest in land conservation and how much to invest, focusing on the roles of poverty, land tenure security, and market access. Unlike most other studies, we used a double-hurdle model in the analysis with panel data collected in a household survey of 6,408 plots in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.

Currently, there is a general dichotomy in rural development policies. This dichotomy between extension-driven adoption of modern inputs on the one hand, and community-driven local public goods on the other hand, is particularly evident in the highlands of Ethiopia. Despite the obvious trade-offs between these two approaches, the target populations seldom get the chance to express their preferences for them.