Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 1.
Traditional areas: Gobo Deguat village in Tigray, Ethiopia
Gobo Deguat is a remote village in the highlands of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. There are no roads
leading to the village, and the only nearby town is Hawzen, located 100 km from Mekelle, the regional
capital. In this poor region, rural households have various coping strategies when farming does not
generate sufficient food or income. There are several strategies that rely on own resources, such as
selling livestock or donkeys, selling high-value cereals (such as teff) and buying low-value cereals
(such as linseed) in return, and selling timber (from eucalyptus trees). However, the farmers indicated
this is usually only an option for the relatively better-off households. The poor households will go
begging in richer downstream valleys or start using wild foods such as
Opuntia ficus-indica
. For poor
households the food-for-work programmes organized by the Ethiopian Government offer the most
important opportunity to obtain food. At least according to women, this was the most important source
of food in times of need for poor households. However, men usually also mentioned migration to the
regional capital Mekelle or other cities in Ethiopia, and even to Sudan as the most important strategy.
Some mentioned masonry as a specialized skill that some households used to earn non-farm wages
and trading salt with the Afar region.
Thus, it appears that poor rural households in Tigray will revert to non-farm activities sooner than
better-off rural households, who will first rely on their own resources. And it turns out that men and
women within a household follow different strategies.
Source: PIMEA project (www.boci.wur.nl/UK/Archive/Sustainable+agriculture/PIMEA)
same methodology for surveying farm households and intensive monitoring of farm
activities (involving frequent visits by enumerators) over one or more calendar years
(Vlaming et al. 2001). This has resulted in a rich dataset of 449 households
(including data on 3305 individuals) that is consistent across households and
countries.
The surveyed villages cover the spectrum of locations/rural-urban distance
relations (depicted in Figure 1) as shown in Table 2. The sample is strongly biased
towards Africa. The two Asian locations provide a strong contrast to the African
locations, being in a more densely populated continent and being located close to
urban centres. This confounds the differences we find between areas with new urban
links and the other more remote areas. Nonetheless, the distribution of location and
distance to urban centres is fairly even (similar number of observations within each
zone) which gives an even distribution in access to markets and institutional
environments. Illustrations of individual cases are given in Boxes 1 to 3.
The importance of non-farm employment
Obtaining reliable data on non-farm employment and especially on revenues derived
from non-farm work is not easy. In general, people are rather reticent about
disclosing how much they have earned, and what their sources of income are. We,
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