In Ethiopia, famine and extreme poverty are a result of insufficient food relief, poor macroeconomic factors, climate shocks, undiversified livelihoods based on low productivity in rain-fed agriculture, coupled with institutional incapacity. To serve as a context, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the conceptual framework of human development and capability paradigm to food security. In addition, it highlights evidence and a comparative analysis of the Asian green revolution experience, and places emphasis on sustainable and intersectoral growth through agricultural transformation and promotion of rural non-farm economy agenda to reverse the trends of protracted food crises in Ethiopia. Rapid, science-led, and employment-intensive agricultural growth, accompanied by the promotion of the rural non-farm sector, is of great importance to the rural economy. These will bring about farm sector competitiveness and enhanced productivity, environmental outcomes, acceleration of human development, new opportunities provided to the small-scale food producers, and desirable changes to the rural landscape. The study further introduces a brief analysis of the prominent role of social protection instruments in strengthening food entitlements and basic capabilities, including individual agencies. It suggests that actualizing sustainable food security and hastening human development under Ethiopia’s exclusive settings require the recognition of the rural economic heterogeneity as well as holistic and pragmatic policies, which promote sustainable and inclusive growth.

Anthropogenic global warming and the depletion of nonrenewable resources necessitate a transition towards bioenergy to accelerate sustainable development and carbon neutrality. This study quantified the availability and energy potential of crop (cereals, legumes, roots and tubers) straws based on data from the Northern, North East and Savannah regions in Ghana. The annual technical straw potential was 2,967,933 tonnes, whilst the crop straws with the highest technical potential were yam (935,927 tonnes), groundnut (485,236 tonnes), maize (438,926 tonnes) and soybean (374,564 tonnes). The technical energy potential of all the crop straws was 42,256 TJ, although the energy potential of yam, groundnut, maize and soybean was 13,922 TJ, 7611 TJ, 5704 TJ and 5409 TJ, respectively. There was a linear correlation between the straw produced and the energy potential per region. The Northern region (28,153 TJ) recorded the highest energy potential followed by the Savannah (8330 TJ) and North East (5773 TJ) regions. To serve as context, the research placed an emphasis on the sustainability of crop straws for bioenergy and added a brief analysis of the life cycle assessment (LCA) of bioenergy scenarios to explore the environmental sustainability of crop straw-based power generation. This study will serve as a reference in understanding LCA inference on practicable research of crop straw-based, power plant expansion in Ghana and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

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