Abstract
Cereals are important crops for achieving food security in Ethiopia. Maize, sorghum and millet are major cereal grown by smallholder farmers of the country for consumption. Fifteen (15) years data of total production, yield and cultivated area of these cereal crops in Ethiopia were assessed from http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/ to understand the trends of production, yield and cultivated area of maize, sorghum and millet through time and analyze the contribution of increasing yield and cultivated area for total production at the country level. The result revealed that total production in 1993-2019 was increased by 560%, 736% and 732% in maize, sorghum and millet respectively whereas cultivated area for these crops in the same period was increased by 170%, 304% and 159%. Yield of maize, sorghum and millet in 2019 years was 147%, 107% and 222% respectively more compared to the yield of the respective crops in the base year. In maize and sorghum, a unit increase of yield was associated with 3 million tons of production, and in millet a unit increase in yield was associated to nearly 5.5 million tones production. In conclusion, both yield increase and cultivation area expansion contributed to production increase but strong relation was observed between yield and total production in maize, sorghum and millet in Ethiopia.
Highlights
Ethiopian’s growth and development is largely based on agriculture
The result showed that total production of maize, sorghum and millet in 2019 was increased by 560%, 736% and 732% compared to the production of the respective crops in 1993
The trends in yield and cultivation area during this time (1993-2019) show that yield increase outweighs the cultivation area expansion only for millet and cultivation area increase for maize and sorghum was more than the yield increase of these crops in Ethiopia
Summary
Ethiopian’s growth and development is largely based on agriculture. Population of the country is currently approaching to 112 million and it is projected to be 188 million by 2050 [8]. Grain self sufficiency in Ethiopia can be achieved by tripling cereal production such as maize, sorghum and millet in the country using improved technologies [11, 15]. This three-fold increase in production is possible by growing improved and high yielding crop varieties with good crop husbandry. Increasing productivity with better resource use efficiencies such as fertilizer, land, herbicide which is the so called sustainable intensification is getting popularity worldwide Though, these practices are currently a priority areas for achieving food self sufficiency in Ethiopian context, there is an argument that production can be increased with an expansion of cultivation area of crops. The objectives of this paper are (1) to understand the trend in total production, cultivation area and yield of maize, sorghum and millet with time and (2) to quantify the contribution of yield and cultivation area to total production of these cereals in Ethiopia in fifteen years during 19932015
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