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Listening to Local Voices

Getachew and Ingida are two seasoned farmers in the fertile area of Debre Zeit in rural Ethiopia who have shared their views on the hardship of feeding growing families. “In the past, children were considered wealth,” said Ingida, a 53-year-old father of four boys and three girls. “A man who had children was a rich man—especially male children, since they could work on the farm,” he reflects. “But now, it is hard to support a large family; we must reduce the number of children.” When asked what changed, he says, “the soil has changed its behavior because it is overworked, the climate has been unpredictable, and the population is growing.”

© International Food Policy Research InstituteGetachew, 59 and himself a father of 9, asserts, “now, education is most important. I don’t want my children to be farmers! I want them to be educated and to live a decent life.” Ingida continues, “if my children get a job, that is good. But if they don’t, I want them to be creators of jobs. Let them come back and teach us what they have learned. They can work as traders, as teachers, or as farmers. Even as farmers, because they are educated, they will be able to do more with the land. We have been farming in the same way for too long. We need to change.”

But, how will farmers like these, all over Ethiopia, achieve the universal dream of climbing out of poverty and giving their children a better life? Many policy makers in Ethiopia think these dreams will be realized when farmers can use the market to earn better incomes. In a country where 80 percent of the population consists of farmers with less than one hectare of land on average, a major thrust of Ethiopia’s current poverty reduction strategy is to transform millions of Ethiopian smallholder farms from subsistence production—producing barely enough to eat—to commercial farms that are producing with a market in mind. But this is a difficult goal to achieve in a country that still practices agriculture on ever smaller plots and in much the same way that was done 3,000 years ago.

While agricultural growth has the strongest potential to transform the overall economy and reduce poverty, it must first grow. At present, Ethiopian agriculture is still at very low productivity levels compared to world standards.

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