The implication of intra-rural migration on crop output commercialization in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

Migration as part of the livelihood of the rural farm household has got a recognition for its developmental effect. Currently, bringing smallholder farmers to the market through better agricultural productivity and market integration is the critical element for agricultural transformation in particular and rural transformation in general. To this effect, improving smallholder farmers’ tendency towards commercialization through better technology adoption and input utilization has been seen to play significantly in various studies.  However, in developing countries like Ethiopia, where low level of credit facilities and poor institutional arrangements are installed, adoption of productive agricultural technologies and input utilization is very low. Thus, among the various alternative livelihood diversification strategies for poor farmers, migration is the one which helps to bridge the financial gap and input requirements of the rural farmers and ‘asset accumulation’. This study focused on intra-rural migration which is still dominant in size as well as a research segment which is buried in migration study. Cognizant to the interplay between migration and agriculture, this study had an attempt to examine the impact of intra-rural labour migration on crop output commercialization using primary first-hand original data with support of stringent econometric models.

KEYWORDS:

• Intra-rural
• migration
• PSM
• commercialization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Intra-rural migration is still the dominant pattern of migration in developing countries like Ethiopia (Adino, Atinkut, Yehuala, & Petros, 2015; Ayele & Degefa, 2018; Carr, 2009; CSA, 2014; Lucas, 1997, 2007) but left ignored in the different migration studies. As a result, this study primarily focused on rural-to-rural migration which will be elaborated in the next section.

2. $n=\frac{Z^{2}Pq}{{(e)}^2}$ $n=Z^{2}Pq(e{)}^2,$ In which ‘n$n$’ represents the sample size of the study households that is distributed proportionally to each kebele. Whereas ‘z’ represented the inverse standard cumulative distribution that corresponds to the level of precision level ‘e’ in which in this study which takes the value of 5%.

3. Since the selected areas are rural districts in the same zone, relatively there are no such huge differences in the price of agricultural commodities. Despite this fact, we have used the average price to keep prices uniform across the sample areas.

4. Since the farm households are levelled as migrants and non-migrants based on the operational definitional articulated above, the binary logit model will be only to generate the propensity scores of the two groups to be matched later.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kibrom Adino Abate

Dr. Kibrom Adino Abate is an assistant professor in Development Studies (Rural Development) at University of Gondar. He obtained his PhD from Addis Ababa University. As a staff member of the University of Gondar, he actively engaged in both individual and team based researches in the areas of on migration, commercialization, impact evaluation, rural development, livelihood and gender and Agriculture.

Bamlaku Alamirew Alemu

Dr. Bamlaku Alamirew Alemu is an Associate Professor at Addis Ababa University, College of Development Studies, and Center for Rural Development. He holds his PhD in Development Economics (from the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen, Germany). He has published several articles and his main research interests include analysis of poverty, food security, resilience, adoption of technologies and impact evaluation. He also served as national consultant to IOM, FAO and WFP on issues related to migration, labor market analysis, resilience, policy analysis, food security and agricultural commercialization.

Degye Goshu Habteyesus

Dr. Degye Goshu Habteyesus is an associate professor of Agricultural economics at the Kotebe Metroplitain University, at the Department of Economics. He has published a number of publications in the areas of food security and nutrition, commercialization. Poverty, and sectoral policy options just to mention few.