Food-for-work (FFW) is the most widely used type of public works program in Ethiopia through which a high share of the food aid is distributed.

This paper assesses the impacts of FFW in Tigray, a chronically food insecure region in Ethiopia, in terms of relieving liquidity constraints and thereby improving input use in agriculture. A Heckman selection model on the adoption and intensity of fertilizer use demonstrated that FFW positively influenced the decision to adopt fertilizer and there was no evidence of disincentive effect.

The authors investigated the impact of soil and water conservation (SWC) investment on farm productivity in Kenya. They focused on plots with and without SWC, testing whether increased SWC is beneficial for yield and affects input levels, input returns, and crop characteristics.

This paper evaluates the impact of credit availability on communal and commercial sector maize output in Zimbabwe. This is important given the increased use of concessionary credit for agriculture as a policy strategy to increase agricultural output and food security, in response to the disruption caused by controversial land reform.

Explaining soil capital facilitates a better understanding of constraints and opportunities for increased agricultural production and reduced land degradation. The diversity in farmers’ soil capital, production strategies, and general farming systems (including conservation investments) points to the value of internalizing these aspects in the formulation of the government’s policies and extension advice on sustainable agriculture.

This paper integrates traditional economic variables, soil properties, and variables on soil conservation technologies to estimate agricultural output among small-scale farmers in Kenya’s central highlands. The study finds that integrating traditional economics and soil science is invaluable, especially as omitting measures of soil capital can cause omitted-variable bias. The central policy implication is that while fertilizers are generally beneficial, their application is a complex art, and more is not necessarily better.

This study used the newly developed metafrontier approach to assess the technical efficiency of small-scale food production in the Ethiopian highlands at plot level, in order to investigate the role of soil conservation technology in enhancing agricultural productivity.

Stone bunds in the Ethiopian highlands showed statistically significant and positive impact on yield in low-rainfall areas, but not in high-rainfall areas, and they did not have a statistically significant impact on production risk in either area.

Stone bund performance varied by agro-ecology type, which implies the need for appropriate technologies that enhance productivity and are better adapted to local conditions.

This examination of the impacts of market and institutional imperfections on technology adoption found that Ethiopian farmers’ decisions to adopt fertilizer significantly and negatively depended on whether they also adopted soil conservation, but not vice versa. Market imperfections were significant factors in explaining variations in decisions to adopt farm technology, such that relieving market imperfections could increase adoption of farm technologies.