Due to the rapid growth of cities in Africa, more farmers now live in the rural hinterland providing food to urban residents. However, empirical evidence on how urbanization affects these farmers is scarce.
On April 1, 2016, ESSP’s Bart Minten presented the latest research at EDRI on this gap in our understanding of the relationship between proximity to a city and the production behavior of rural staple crop producers. Minten highlighted how Ethiopia has significantly changed in the last decade with this regard (Figure 1), and described these changes in relation to the crop teff as an example of how proximity to urban centers affects farmers’ agricultural production environments and practices.
Figure 1 – Changes in travel time for the population of Ethiopia
1996/1997 2010/2011
The analytical research results presented between proximity to a city and the production behavior of rural staple crop producers, show that farmers that are more closely located to Addis Ababa receive higher teff prices, but also face higher wages and land rental prices, and rely significantly more on formal factor markets. Figure 2 indicates how the transaction costs are highly significant across the transport gradient.
Figure 2 – Transaction Costs across the transport gradient
Moreover, the results show that modern input use, land and labor productivity, and profitability in teff production improve with urban proximity. Access to information and knowledge also displays a strong association with urban proximity as illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3
In conclusion, Minten underlined the implications of these findings and the considerations when planning for change, noting in particular, how important appropriate inputs and knowledge are for the agricultural population in order that these rural dwellers can profit from new opportunities as cities expand, infrastructure improves and agriculture transforms.
Full details of this presentation are available on ESSP’s website.
This presentation was organized by ESSP with support from EDRI. ESSP is a collaborative program undertaken by IFPRI and EDRI, whose objective is to help improve the policy-making decision process in Ethiopia.
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