The opportunities and constraints facing Ethiopian agriculture are strongly influenced by geographical location.

Ethiopia’s crop agriculture is complex, involving substantial variation in crops grown across the country’s different regions and ecologies.

Ethiopia is changing at an accelerating pace. Major investments in roads are bringing tens of millions of people effectively closer to major urban centers and services.

The livestock sector is an important subsector of Ethiopia’s economy in terms of its contributions to both agricultural value-added and national gross domestic product (GDP).

Indeed, the reality of Ethiopia’s agriculture and food security situation is complex because of variations across space within Ethiopia as well as variations over time due to changes in policies, weather shocks, and other factors.

Over the past two decades, decisionmakers in Ethiopia have pursued a range of policies and investments to boost agricultural production and productivity, particularly with respect to the food staple crops that are critical to reducing poverty in t

In Ethiopia, as in many other African countries, there is a pressing need to improve household food security.

Agrarian communities dependent on rainfall are vulnerable to production shortfalls due to drought and other climatic shocks.

The quality, quantity, and composition of food consumption are major determinants of the nutritional well-being of individuals, which has, in turn, important implications for individual and household-level health, productivity, and income.

Ethiopia’s economy has experienced rapid growth in recent years.

Cereal is the single largest subsector of Ethiopia’s agriculture. It dominates in terms of its share in rural employment, agricultural land use, and calorie intake, as well as its contribution to national income.

Progress and policy challenges

In doing so, the chapter builds on research addressing how poor households respond to shocks; see Morduch (2005) and references therein, the review paper by Skoufias and Quisumbing (2005), and the recent collection edited by Dercon (2005).

This chapter explores these dynamics in the pastoralist commons of eastern Ethiopia. We study current practices of managing water and pasture resources of pastoralist and agropastoralist groups at three sites in Somali Region, Ethiopia.

The research reported in this chapter sought to address these shortcomings by integrating institutional analysis (for problem identification and targeting of interventions) with action research (for pilot testing of institutional innovations to ad

In this chapter we discuss two cases of pastoralist involvement in agriculture and investigate the challenges and opportunities of this transition.

The analysis and evidence presented here have shown that farmers selling to PMGs receive higher prices than otherwise, opening new opportunities for smallholder farmers to benefit from markets.