Cities and agricultural transformation in Africa: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Version: February 2016 AbstractDue to the rapid growth of cities in Africa, a larger number of farmers is living in the rural hinterland providing food to urban residents. However, empirical evidence on how urbanization affects these farmers is scarce. To fill this gap, this paper explores the relationship between proximity to a city and the production behavior of rural staple crop producers. More in particular, we analyze unique data from teff producing farmers in major producing areas around Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. We find that farmers more closely located to Addis Ababa face higher wages and land rental prices, but because they receive higher teff prices they have better incentives to intensify production. Moreover, we observe that modern input use, land and labor productivity, and profitability in teff production improve with urban proximity. There is a strong and significant direct effect of urban proximity, which is suggested to be related with more use of formal factor markets, less transaction costs, and better access to information. In contrast, we do not find strong and positive relationships of rural population density increases -as an alternative source of agricultural transformation -as they seem to lead to immiserizing effects in these settings. Our results show that urban proximity should be considered as an important determinant of the process of agricultural intensification and transformation in developing countries.

Evolving livestock sector

“…Distance to urban centers is negatively associated with adoption of all inputs. This also is consistent with the adoption of modern inputs in crop production, given significant differences in factor and output prices and therefore profitability over space (Bachewe et al 2018;Vandercasteelen et al 2018). The results corroborate the evidence that farmers in urban and peri-urban areas and in rural areas closer to major urban centers use improved inputs at higher rates than farmers in remote areas (Minten et al 2018b).…”

Challenges and Potential Solutions for Sustainable Urban-Rural Linkages in a Ghanaian Context

“…Resources and services flow are significant to urban-rural linkages [3,7,[29][30][31]. Natural resources include minerals, timber and forest products (wild foods), water, and land [3,29,32].…”

Food systems for healthier diets in Ethiopia: Toward a research agenda

“…Understanding how the new infrastructure investments affect food transport and distance traveled, and how this influences the food environment, is important in order to leverage the benefits of the new infrastructure for healthier diets (Research Question 16). Emerging evidence indicates that improved road connectivity does indeed improve diet diversity and food security through improved market access and that urbanization creates enhanced incentives for agricultural investments in rural areas that are well connected to cities (Vandercasteelen, Beyene, Minten, & Swinnen, 2017). This is in line with research in Central America and Asia, where farmers with better access to roads and water benefited more from improved value chains in agricultural marketing systems (Michelson, 2016).…”

“…However, we need to move beyond understanding urbanization's direct effects on diet and toward examining its indirect effects on resource use and the environment, such as embodied energy for food production, transport, packaging, cold storage, food waste, and the rest of the entire food supply chain, from farm to fork. For example, in Ethiopia the distance to a city was found to have important effects on intensification decisions by farmers, indicating that cities are increasingly becoming engines of agricultural and food system transformation in rural areas (Vandercasteelen et al, 2017).…”