Abstract
BackgroundSustainable land management is considered as one of the useful approaches to combat the threat of various forms of land degradation in Ethiopia. Despite this, there is scant information regarding households’ decision towards the implementation of sustainable land management practices. This paper, therefore, looks into the determinants for the continued use and choice of the sustainable land management practices by smallholder farmers and its productivity effect in three randomly chosen districts in Tigrai region, Ethiopia. The study uses data from household survey and key informant interviews. The paper employs a binary logit to analyze the determinants for the decision of continued use of sustainable land management practices, and a multivariate probit to analyze the simultaneous adoption decision of sustainable land management practices using cross sectional data collected from 230 randomly selected households. The impact of sustainable land management practices was also evaluated using propensity score matching.ResultsFarming techniques, wealth status, agro-ecological variations, and plot level characteristics were found to be associated with the implementation decision of sustainable land management practices by rural households. Besides, institutional supports and access to basic infrastructures influenced the overall continued use of sustainable land management practices and the preference of households toward these practices. The study also finds that the value of crop production of sustainable land management users was on average 77–100% higher than that of non-users.ConclusionsThe results of the current study confirm that the implementation of various sustainable land management practices are influenced by farming technologies deployed by rural households, agro-ecological variations, plot characteristics, and institutional supports. The findings also affirm that most of the sustainable land management practices are complementary to one another, and implementing two or more sustainable land management practices on a given plot is highly associated with higher value of crop production. Such complementarity highlights that the productivity effect of a given sustainable land management practice is enhanced by the use of the other ones.
Highlights
Land degradation has been the critical challenge for Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries
These evidences indicate that the natural resources in the continent have been excessively utilized and this resulted in land degradation which in turn affects the livelihood of African farmers as the majority of them rely on the direct use of natural resources for their very survival
The two sample t tests confirmed that a significant difference was observed in asset holding and livestock ownership measured in terms of tropical livestock unit (TLU) between continued users and non-users of sustainable land management (SLM) practices
Summary
Land degradation has been the critical challenge for Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. FAO (2011) report shows that Africa loses over 50 tons of soil per hectare and nearly 4 million hectares of forest land annually, largely in humid and sub-humid West Africa. These evidences indicate that the natural resources in the continent have been excessively utilized and this resulted in land degradation which in turn affects the livelihood of African farmers as the majority of them rely on the direct use of natural resources for their very survival. This paper, looks into the determinants for the continued use and choice of the sustainable land management practices by smallholder farmers and its productivity effect in three randomly chosen districts in Tigrai region, Ethiopia. The impact of sustainable land management practices was evaluated using propensity score matching
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