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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. Using plot and farm level panel data from the central Highlands of Ethiopia matched with corresponding village level rainfall data; results show that both the current year’s decision to adopt and the intensity of fertilizer adoption is positively associated with higher rainfall levels experienced in the previous year. Furthermore, we find a concave relationship between previous season rainfall levels and fertilizer adoption, indicating that too much rainfall discourages adoption. Abundant rainfall in the previous year could depict relaxed liquidity constraints and increased affordability of fertilizer, which makes rainfall availability critical in severely credit constrained environments. In light of similar existing literature, the major contribution of the study is its use of plot level panel data, which permits us to investigate the importance of plot characteristics in fertilizer adoption decisions.

This paper seeks to find explanations to why land productivity is lower on land rented out by female landlord households than on land rented out by male landlord households. First it is demonstrated that this productivity differential is highly significant after controlling for land productivity using nearest neighbour and kernel plot matching methods. Then we test alternative hypotheses that possibly may explain the productivity differential. These include transaction costs in the land rental market, larger problem with Marshallian inefficiency on land rented out by female landlords, poorer ability to screen good tenants and evict bad tenant by female landlords, and larger proportion of pure landlords (with poorer monitoring capacity) among female landlords. Using GLS and controlling for sample selection we found evidence of Marshallian inefficiency in the analysis but this could not explain the gender productivity differential. Female landlords have tenants who are older, own less oxen, are more related, and under longer-term contracts. In the parametric regressions land productivity was significantly lower on plots rented out to in-law tenants and this appeared to explain the gender productivity differential. Female landlords may be forced to rent their land to their inlaws and they are unable to evict them even if they are inefficient land users. Land reforms that strengthen women’s land rights may therefore be good for efficiency as well as equity. Recent land regulations restricting renting out of land to maximum half of the farm area may contribute to weaken women’s land rights as a large share of the poor female landlords currently rent out more than half of their land because they lack the necessary nonland resources to farm efficiently.

The study is an empirical investigation of agrobiodiversity conservation decisions of small farmers in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The primary objective is to measure the effectiveness of Community Seed Banking (CSB) in enhancing diversity while providing productivity incentives. The analytical framework draws from the synergetic nature of the possible improvment of the working of the seed system and enhanced diversity. We employ Amemiya’s GLS estimator to investigate simultaneity between participation and the level of diversity. Our results indicate a significant impact of participation in CSB on farm-level agrobiodiversity. However, farmer knowledge and experience associated with biodiversity conservation were not found to have the expected reinforcing impact on the degree of biodiversity. CSB participation also led to a moderate productivity increase consistent with the need for such incentives to enhance diversity at a farm level. Our assessment of the performance of the GLS estimator yielded a significant discrepancy between the GLS and bootstrap estimates. This led to the conclusion that bootstrapping asymptotic estimations might be required for appropriate inference even when sample sizes are reasonably large.