The Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia are characterised by extensive livestock production under a communal land-use system that has evolved in response to variable rainfall and uncertain production conditions. However, the last two decades have witnessed an increasing privatisation of rangelands for crop production and private grazing. The results of a quantitative assessment are used to develop a framework for assessing the drivers of change and their long-term implications. It is concluded that certain national policies have resulted in conflicts of authority between traditional and formal systems, creating an avenue for spontaneous enclosures, associated conflicts and decreasing human welfare.
The reduction of state presence in irrigation and the transfer of management from government agencies to farmers or farming communities has become a widespread phenomenon, in response to the dual problem of low irrigation performance and constraints to public funding. The underlying principle is to encourage farmers and local communities to take responsibility for the management of local resources, and thereby limit external interventions to the provision information and institutional support services. As most of the schemes in question were not primarily designed for farmer management, experiences worldwide show a mixed picture of positive and negative results. The case of South Africa has recently received attention, as the few pilot schemes, especially in the Northern Province, do not seem to hold much promise of success. Current discussions on the subject raise a lot of issues and hypotheses about the subject of irrigation management transfer to farmers. The paper is an attempt to test some of these hypotheses in the African context, using the Arabie Scheme as a case study.
With increasing land scarcity, efforts to increase agricultural production in the past decades have been concentrated on agricultural intensification. Recent studies have shown that improvement in market access increases agricultural productivity, firstly by facilitating specialisation and exchange transactions in rural areas, and secondly through intensification of input use. The extent to which specialisation and intensification contribute to agricultural productivity, and how this increase is distributed across farmers of different farm sizes and resources, will be presented in this paper. The output generated from a variance analysis is used to develop and estimate a three stage least square regression model. The model is used to assess the effects of market access on agricultural productivity, and the distribution of marketgenerated benefits among small and large farmers. Data collected from 100 farmers in Machakos District are used for the analysis. The results indicate that aggregate physical productivity increases with improvement in market access, but that there is a disparity in the distribution of market-generated efficiency gains between small and large farmers (large farmers benefit more than small farmers), and between farmers with different access options to markets -easy access farmers benefit more than farmers with difficult access.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.