Agricultural Research and Food Production in Ethiopia.

The supply of adequate and nutritious food to the population is one of the major concerns of the Ethiopian Government. There has been a consistent decline in crop production and food availability for over 20 years. Although the immediate cause for this problem is insufficient and erratic rainfall, it is felt that the problem is far more complex than can be accounted for by drought alone. Food production and availability is a function of the natural resource base, production technology and production policy. It is believed that the country's natural resource base is more than adequate to meet its needs, provided that adequate investment is allocated to accelerate its development. Improved production technologies can substantially increase productivity. Such technologies are currently available for at least parts of the country, as demonstrated by yield figures obtained from pilot cum-demonstration plots on farmers' fields. There are major constraints in the policy domain and these are considered a bottleneck in the adoption of improved production technologies by farmers. The generation and transfer of improved technologies in Ethiopia is a recent event and has not yet been fully developed. Several organizations in the country carry out research with some degree of coordination. Despite great efforts, it has not yet been possible to cover all the major agro-ecological zones of the country. The level of investment in agricultural research is much below what it should be, considering the fact that the agriculture sector contributes the greater part to the Gross Domestic Product. Research priority setting is at its infancy. There is no actual study done to measure the impact of agricultural research on the national food production. However, it can easily be guessed that there is very little impact so far, since the overwhelming majority of the peasant farmers, accounting for over 93% of the cropped area, are largely unaware of or uninterested in the improved agricultural technologies, even if such technologies were available at the right time, place and price, which they are not in most cases. Improved productivity and increased production can be achieved by developing and applying a range of policies and strategies in relation to several sectors of the national economy.