Welfare and food security response of animal feed and water resource scarcity in Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

The scarcity of grazing and water for an animal has a negative effect on household welfare and food security either by affecting livestock production directly, affecting crop or off-farm income due to labor reallocation or through its direct impact on time leisure consumption. The economic impacts of resource (grazing and water) scarcity on welfare are undermined. Thus, a better understanding that is derived from the factual evidence is required. The first objective of this paper is to explore the link between natural resource scarcity and per capita food consumption expenditure (PCFE) as proxy for welfare and food security followed by the second objective of analyzing whether this effect is uniform across all quantile groups and there is gender differential effect using distance and shadow price as resource scarcity indicators. The paper used a relatively unique data set from a randomly drawn 518 sample farmers in Northern Ethiopia. To address our first objective, we employ the IV two-stage least square estimation for welfare and probit model for food security drawing on non-separable farm household model. Our estimates show that about 48% of the households were food secure while 52% were food insecure. Our results confirmed the theoretical prediction that resource scarcity affects household PCFE and food security adversely as predicted by the downward spiral hypothesis. The results indicate that animal feed and water scarcity have an important impact on welfare and food security. As expected, in aggregate, reducing time spent searching for water per day leads to an increase in PCFE and food security. Similarly, a decrease in time wastage for searching grazing increase PCFE and food security respectively, and an increment of PCFE and food security is achieved by a reduction in crop residue transporting time per day. The gender differential analysis signals that increasing resource scarcity results in low PCFE and food security, with the male are considerably likely to have less food consumption expenditure and being food insecure more as compared to female households. The total impact of time spent searching for water, grazing, and transporting straw on per PCFE is − 0.142%, − 0.102%, and − 0.092%, respectively, and decreasing reaching time to a water, grazing, and straw source by 0.6 min will increase PCFE by 354 ETB, 254 ETB, and 229 ETB for the median household. Depending on results from the quantile regression, the effect of water and feed scarcity is not uniform across the food consumption distribution.

Building Capacity to Cope with Climate Change-Induced Resource-Based Conflicts Among Grassroots Communities in Kenya

“…They therefore experience shortage of water and pasture the greater part of the year. Arable land is scarce (Serdeczny et al 2017;Hadush 2018).…”

Examining the Effect of Animal Resource Scarcity on Farm Labor and Farm Production in Northern Ethiopia

“…There are two methods of scarcity measures in the literature on resource scarcity: physical measures and economic measures. Physical measures include distance from the resource (fuelwood, water, grazing, and fodder) or village-level availability of these resources (as applied by Cooke, 1998aCooke, , 1998bCooke, Köhlin, and Hyde, 2008;Damte, Koch, and Mekonnen, 2011;Hadush, 2018;Mekonnen, Damte, and Deribe, 2015;Mekonnen et al, 2017;Veld et al, 2006). However, labor shortages in rural areas are often more important for household fuelwood-use decisions than the physical scarcity of fuelwood.…”

“…As demonstrated (Baland et al, 2010;Cooke, 1998aCooke, , 1998bHadush, 2018;Mekonnen, 1999;Mekonnen, Damte, and Deribe, 2015;Murphy, Berazneva, and Lee, 2015), the opportunity cost is commonly approximated in two ways. First, it is the wage rate multiplied by the time spent per unit of environmental good collection, as a measure of scarcity, and second, as the marginal product of labor in resource collection multiplied by the shadow wage.…”

“…This study did not address the issue of reverse causality and endogeneity related to time use because of a lack of proper instruments for time use. It rather treated them as exogenous following the work of Cooke (1998a), Cooke, Köhlin, and Hyde (2008), Hadush (2018), and Mekonnen, Damte, and Deribe (2015).…”

“…The only study directly related to ours is by Mekonnen et al (2017), whose results indicate that crop farm production decreases as time spent on collecting dung increases in rural Ethiopia. An empirical study by Hadush (2018) investigates the link between resource scarcity and welfare, and his findings indicate that animal feed and water scarcity have an adverse impact on welfare and food security in the study area.…”