Do Agricultural Package Programs Improve the Welfare of Rural People? Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Ethiopia

Araya Teka,Sung-Kyu Lee

doi:10.3390/agriculture10050190

Araya Teka, Sung-Kyu Lee

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture10050190

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to assess the welfare status and analyze the impact of participation in farm package programs on the welfare of smallholder farmers. We used three round panel data of 789 households from the Eastern zone of Tigray, and the fixed effect instrumental variable method was employed in the estimation. The study found that consumption expenditure, income, and asset per capita of the households increased across the survey years. The participation of households in the integrated package programs has a positive and statistically significant impact on the consumption expenditure and calorie per adult equivalent, but not the income and asset per capita of the households. Also, affects the consumption expenditure per adult equivalent of the married households. To enhance the welfare of the beneficiaries, the provision of the package programs should align with the local resource endowment, focus on youth, widowed and divorced households and the government should prioritize and limit the number of packages that households can participate in.

Highlights

At present, Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to about 224 million undernourished people.It accounts for about 25 percent of the world’s undernourished population
The major objective of the paper is to assess the welfare status of the smallholder farmers, analyze the impact of household’s participation on farm package programs on the welfare and examine to what extent the integration of package programs determines the welfare of rural households using the fixed effect instrumental variable estimation method
When we extended Equation (7), Pit = β0 + β1 Hit + β2 Ait + β3 Vit + β4 HPit + β5 Tit + ci + εi where the participation variable( Pit ) is the status of the household in participating agricultural package programs, Hit is the household features; Ait is the landholding of the household which is expected to increase the households’ participation rate

Summary

Introduction

Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to about 224 million undernourished people. It accounts for about 25 percent of the world’s undernourished population. Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) countries have worked more to reduce the level of poverty, food insecurity, and nourishment in the region and achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals [1]. As part of their development agenda, governments have diffused multiple agricultural package programs needed to both increase the productivity of the smallholder farmers and improve the welfare of rural people. Experiences of some countries and empirical findings showed shreds of evidence for the weak effect of the induced household-based agricultural package programs on the households’ poverty, consumption, income, nutrition, and social values [7,8,9,10]

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