Exploring Fruit Market Potential of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

To improve the livelihood of farmers, different agricultural interventions have been done under federal and regional Governments. The current government has given more emphasis on improving agricultural productivity in the past decades by supplying new agricultural inputs and technologies, new agricultural system and extension services thereby improve the livelihood of farmers and to increase the GDP of the country. Under the sub sector of agricultural activities, horticulture contributes a significant amount to the livelihood of farmers. This research is conducted on fruit market potentials of Tigray region with the objectives of identifying the potentials of fruit for market and identifying major problems and opportunities in fruit production and marketing, identifying the major type of fruits that are produced in Tigray, to assess the fruit market channel in the region and to assess the income contribution of fruit at household economy. To accomplish this study both primary and secondary sources of data were used. Primary data were collected from sample farmer respondents using structured questionnaire. The farmers (producers) sampled in this study were those who are engaged in fruit production and marketing. A total of 274 samples were selected in these sample districts. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics and econometric model. As the result of the descriptive statistics revealed that among the total sample 42.34%, 41.30% and 10.6% of respondents have an experience on fruit growing 1 to 5 years 6 to 10 years and 11 to 15years respectively. The remaining 4.1 and 1.5 % of the respondents have an experience of 16 to 20 and more than 20 years. In regard to fruit production and marketing poetical of the producer the result shows that out of the total sample producers, 183 (65.6 %) of them produce orange an average fruit amount of 460.9kg and 129 (47.1%) and 125 (45.62%) Produce Guava and Banana with the amount of 407.4kg and 221 kg respectively. Furthermore, of the total sample 16 (5.8%) sample respondents produce apple an average amount of 66.7 kg. From the total amount of fruit production farmers supply to the market is 85%.The result also revelled that 37.38% of the average household income is from fruits. Therefore, as fruit contributes more in the households’ livelihood, improving the quality and, productivity and the market situations are among the important intervention areas by the development agents and other partners

Unravelling the dynamics of access to farmland in Tigray, Ethiopia: the 'emerging land market' revisited

This article uses ethnographic evidence from Tigray to revisit the debate on informal rural land markets in present-day Ethiopia. It explores informal farmland rental from a historico-anthropological, micro-analytical perspective in relation to the formal allocation of land use rights and to other informal land transfer practices. It shows how different rationales for land rental give rise to different socially embedded tenancy configurations. On the basis of this empirical evidence, the paper questions the appropriateness of the common idea that in Ethiopia ‘the land rental market is expanding’. It argues that research and policy thinking on land in Ethiopia could gain analytical power and relevance by adopting a less monolithic and abstract view on people’s informal land transfer practices.status: publishe

How Tigrayan farmers turn land use rights (and their lack) into access to farm land

Land tenure in Ethiopia is much-discussed in literature. Most recent studies on rural land deal with legal land use rights and formal tenure security. They usually touch upon a number of formal and informal entitlement exchange mechanisms superimposed on the legal distribution of arable land, but do not go into detail on these superimpositions as practiced and experienced by smallholder farmers nor on the complexity of outcomes they generate in terms of access to land. In-depth qualitative research in one sub-district of the Degua Temben district in Tigray (Northern Ethiopia) reveals the latter to be very relevant as local farmers' conceptions of success and failure are based on access to the benefits of own as well as other people's land. In other words, for farmers in the study area year-to-year materialisation of access to land for cultivation is as much an issue as having legal land use rights, having them secured and having them registered. First, we unravel the current distribution of legal land use rights in the sub-district under study, being the intersection of a number of policy measures on different administrative levels from 1990 until now. Indeed recent land policy decisions in the study area on the one hand are characterised by high levels of decentralisation (i.e. land is divided and administered at the local level), but on the other hand are restricted by strong boundary conditions stated at both the national and the regional level. Secondly, farmers' responses to this "legal" outcome, resulting in "real" access to farm land and its products, are explored. Farmers' initiatives transforming land use rights (or their lack, as land poverty is substantial) are shown to be extremely diverse and to give rise to an alternative distribution of land. Farming households in the research area on average use and enjoy (part of) the benefits of more plots than they have formal user rights on, and their land exchange mechanisms can either have a mitigating or an amplifying influence on land inequality.status: publishe