Climate change is one of the most serious impediments to agricultural prosperity in Ethiopia, especially where livestock is concerned. In particular, rural farming communities in the drylands of the Afar region are severely exposed to the impacts of climate change, with stark reminders from repeating droughts followed by crop failure and livestock decimation. Locals have a long history of applying adaptation measures to maintain their sustenance. However, a growing literature challenges whether these traditional methods can continue to sustain local livelihoods. This study identifies how pastoral, semi-pastoral, agro-pastoral and mixed-farming communities in Afar perceive and adapt to climate change and whether these practices have brought about any improvement in farm income. A panel data set of five years was gathered using structured questionnaires from a sample of 313 households. Household heads pointed out indicators to identify climate-related stress such as erratic rainfall, drought, temperature change, drying of water sources, prevalence of diseases and lack of human and livestock feed. A fixed effects quantitative model on the panel data was estimated to verify the effect of adaptation strategies on income of household heads. We found that the main adaptation strategies that significantly influenced household income levels were forage production (hay and straw), access to water sources, livestock diversification and migration. The implication is that people severely affected by climate change and living in a situation demanding urgent solutions can actively apply various adaptation strategies if the strategies are linked to the creation of sustainable income benefits. Thus, integrated approaches comprising adaptation methods and expected benefits are an important way to induce farming communities to address challenges related to climatic change.

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The increasing population pressure in the rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa has caused land degradation as well as an increase in the number of landless farmers. To promote a conservation-oriented utilization of communal lands and increase the livelihood of poor farmers, the Ethiopian government introduced a program to distribute less-utilized communal lands to landless farmers. This study identified the social norms related to natural resource conservation that affect the participation in this program. Using data from 477 farmer households in northern Ethiopia, we estimated probit models with endogenous regressors for the determinants of social norms and their impacts on program participation. The results show that social norms related to conservation positively affect program participation. Regarding policy implication of the findings, an intervention to improve the social norms of local farmers leads to sustainable resource conservation without reducing intrinsic motivation of the local people. A conservation-oriented utilization of the communal lands would be more effective if the land distribution program was accompanied by other programs to improve the social norms in the villages.

The problem of landlessness has become one of the major challenges facing rural farmers in Tigrai region since the early 1990s. To address the problem, the regional government of Tigrai started to redistribute degraded communal land to landless farmers by ensuring their participation in soil and water conservation activities and willingness to engage in the programme. Thus, the specific objectives of this study are to examine the livelihood options and analyse their economic dependence level of the rural landless households on the apportioned degraded communal land. Data were collected from randomly selected landless households and analysed using descriptive and econometric techniques. Accordingly, the study identified plantation of timber trees, grass collection, engaging in animal fattening, fruit or vegetable production, beekeeping and poultry production were the major livelihood activities practised in the allocated degraded communal land. The study also indicated that the major factors influencing the dependence level of rural landless households on allocated communal land include gender of household head, marital status of household head, distance to farmers’ training centre, livestock holding, land ownership, experience in the programme, communal land ownership type, financial support and per capita expenditure of the households. Therefore, the study concluded that even if the regional government tried to solve the problem of landlessness through hillside distribution programme, it could not sufficiently support the livelihood of the landless rural households in the study districts.

Farmers in developing countries depend on communal natural resources, yet countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing the severe degradation of communal lands due to the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. For the sustainable management of common resources, policy interventions, such as farmer seminars, are necessary to ensure high-level cooperation among farmers for land conservation. However, the effects of this type of information provision are not well known. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the dissemination of conservation information on collaborative communal forest management using an economic field experiment with 936 farmers selected by random sampling from 11 villages in the northern Ethiopian Highlands. We conducted a public goods game experiment using a framework of voluntary contribution to communal land conservation with an intervention to remind participants about the consequence of their behaviors. The results show that the volunteer contribution increased after the intervention, and thereafter the decay of the contribution was slow. The results indicate that providing information about the consequences leads to a higher contribution. The effects of information provision are heterogeneous in terms of social condition, such as access to an urban area and social capital, and individual characteristics, such as wealth. These findings imply that information provision effectively improves farmer collaboration toward natural resource conservation in developing countries.

This study evaluates changes in consumers' concerns on food safety after the outbreaks of E. coli O157 and bovine spongiform encephalopathy~BSE! in Japan using household consumption timeseries data+ A food demand system for Japanese households is estimated using the linear approximate almost-ideal demand system~AIDS! model to evaluate the willingness to accept~WTA! compensation for risk+ The Kalman filtering method is applied to produce estimates without a priori assumption regarding timing of the changes+ The WTA value rises immediately after a food safety crisis occurs and declines in a short time+ However, it does not return to previous levels for an extended period+ A possible explanation for remaining effects of a crisis might be that they are the results of habit formation and learning effects of consumption+ @EconLit citations: D12, D18, Q13#+