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This article analyzes how urban proximity introduces spatial heterogeneity in farm productivity within the high‐value dairy sector in one of the poorest countries in Africa, Ethiopia. We look at how urban proximity—measured as travel time—affects the decisions and productivity of milk farmers located in rural production zones serving fresh milk to the capital Addis Ababa. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find that with each additional hour of travel time, farmers’ milk productivity per cow is reduced, on average, by almost 1 L per day or by 26%. When trying to disentangle the underlying mechanisms (and controlling for transaction costs), we find that farmers’ inclusion in “modern” value chains and their access to commercial milk buyers and milk processing companies drive the urban proximity effect. As only a limited number of farmers have access to such value chains in developing countries, measures to make dairy value chains more inclusive to remote—often poorer—farmers can, therefore, have important benefits for them, for the performance of the dairy sector in Ethiopia, and for the process of agricultural transformation as a whole.

Adoption of yield-increasing technologies is crucial to boost staple food production in sub-Saharan Africa. However, empirical evidence is lacking on the impact of improved agricultural technologies that are scaled up from research at agricultural experiment stations to the farm level. We assess the impact of a new technology, row planting, on farmers’ yields of teff in Ethiopia. Results of a randomized controlled trial show that row planting did not significantly affect teff yields at the farm level. While the treatment effect measured on village demonstration plots managed by extension agents is significant and positive, its magnitude is still lower than the productivity gains found on research plots. To explain the yield gaps between research plots at experiment stations, village demonstration plots, and farm plots, ex post analysis of treatment heterogeneity shows that the literacy level and information access of adopting households have significant interaction effects. Results further suggest that the yield gap is linked to the quality of extension and timely input delivery provided to farmers when transmitting the technology to the field. Greater attention to the design and implementation of public promotion programs appears critical to effectively scale up the adoption of improved technologies in these settings. ispartof: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURAL CHANGE vol:68 issue:3 pages:965-1007 status: published

Post-Harvest Losses (PHL) are considered to pose important economic losses for farmers in developing countries. This paper examines the effects of an intervention in Tanzania, aimed at reducing PHL of maize growing farmers during maize storage. Farmers were invited to attend a training on best practices in post-harvest maize management, and a randomized subset of trainees received the opportunity to buy an improved storage facility (silos) at a substantially discounted price. Data collected at 30 days and 90 days after harvest, however, do not point to significant impacts of the treatments offered to the farmers. Receiving training on best practices improved stated knowledge, but training nor the opportunity to purchase an improved storage had a significant effect on maize storage and sales behavior, physical PHL during storage, or the quality of the stored maize. The paper explores potential explanations, and provides some policy recommendations for future learning and decision-making on how to address PHL issues in developing countries.

Most of the world's displaced people are hosted in low-income countries. Focusing on evidence from poor countries, we review the literature on the economic consequences of hosting refugees or internally displaced people. In the short run, violence, environmental degradation, and disease propagation are major risks to the host populations. In the long run, infrastructure, trade, and labor markets are key channels that determine the impacts on host communities. These impacts can be positive or negative and often unequally distributed among different hosts. We discuss policy options for building resilience in the light of this evidence. Investments in road infrastructure and deepening trade with refugees’ countries of origin are strategies worth exploring for enhancing resilience and transitioning from humanitarian assistance toward development. Finally, we identify key knowledge gaps in this literature and formulate a research agenda for the near future.

© Oxford University Press and Foundation for the European Review of Agricultural Economics 2018; all rights reserved. Improved technologies are increasingly promoted to farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to address low agricultural productivity. There is, however, a lack of evidence on how adoption affects farmers' labour use, gender roles and profitability. This paper analyses the farm level impacts of the recently introduced row planting technology in teff production in Ethiopia. Using a randomised controlled trial, we show that row planting significantly increases the total labour requirement and allocation but not teff yields, resulting in a substantial drop in labour productivity. There is no significant profitability effect at the farm level, seemingly explaining the limited success in upscaling the programme. ispartof: EUROPEAN REVIEW OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS vol:45 issue:4 pages:471-503 status: published

© 2018 Urbanization is happening fast in the developing world and especially so in sub-Saharan Africa where growth rates of cities are among the highest in the world. While cities and, in particular, secondary towns, where most of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa resides, affect agricultural practices in their rural hinterlands, this relationship is not well understood. To fill this gap, we develop a conceptual model to analyze how farmers’ proximity to cities of different sizes affects agricultural prices and intensification of farming. We then test these predictions using large-scale survey data from producers of teff, a major staple crop in Ethiopia, relying on unique data on transport costs and road networks and implementing an array of econometric models. We find that agricultural price behavior and intensification is determined by proximity to a city and the type of city. While proximity to cities has a strong positive effect on agricultural output prices and on uptake of modern inputs and yields on farms, the effects on prices and intensification measures are lower for farmers in the rural hinterlands of secondary towns compared to primate cities. ispartof: World Development vol:106 pages:393-406 status: published

Due to the rapid growth of cities in Africa, a larger number of farmers is living in the rural hinterland providing food to urban residents. However, empirical evidence on how urbanization affects these farmers is scarce. To fill this gap, this paper explores the relationship between proximity to a city and the production behavior of rural staple crop producers. More in particular, we analyze unique data from teff producing farmers in major producing areas around Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. We find that farmers more closely located to Addis Ababa face higher wages and land rental prices, but because they receive higher teff prices they have better incentives to intensify production. Moreover, we observe that modern input use, land and labor productivity, and profitability in teff production improve with urban proximity. There is a strong and significant direct effect of urban proximity, which is suggested to be related with more use of formal factor markets, less transaction costs, and better access to information. In contrast, we do not find strong and positive relationships of rural population density increases -- as an alternative source of agricultural transformation -- as they seem to lead to immiserizing effects in these settings. Our results show that urban proximity should be considered as an important determinant of the process of agricultural intensification and transformation in developing countries.

This study analyzes the perceptions, impacts, and rewards of farmers who adopted row planting for the production of teff as a result of being exposed to a technology promotion campaign for row planting of teff in the Oromia region of Ethiopia.