Famine in Ethiopia: Policy Implications of Coping Failure at National and Household Levels

Can food-for-work encourage agricultural production?

“…This observation indicates that households are far from 'satisfied' in their need for food and hence the income effect of FFW may not yet cause any disincentive. The disincentive effect of FFW on farming in Ethiopia has also been rejected by FAO (1982), Admassie et al (1985), Holt (1983), Kohlin (1987), Webb et al (1992), Maxwell et al (1994) and Abdulai et al (2005) based on household surveys in different parts of Ethiopia.…”

“…Most studies that discussed impact of food aid and FFW on agricultural production in Ethiopia reject the production and labour disincentive effect (Holt, 1983;Kohlin, 1987;Webb et al, 1992;Maxwell et al, 1994). However, since the focus of most of these studies is not the impact of FFW on household production, the studies are neither rigorous in their methodology nor extensive in their data with regard to the effect on agricultural production at household level.…”

Growth and shocks: evidence from rural Ethiopia

“…Two-thirds of the sampled households reported such a crisis. Household harvest failure is of course not a sufficient indicator of the severity of the crisis, as famine analysis has shown in general and in this particular case (Sen, 1981;Webb et al, 1992). Information on coping strategies provides some suggestive evidence of the extent households were affected.…”

“…All but one are not too far from towns, but only half have an all-weather road. The villages were initially selected to study the crisis and recovery from drought and famine in the mid1980s (Webb et al, 1992). Details on the survey are in Dercon and Krishnan (1998) and in Dercon (2002).…”

Linking long-term gully and river channel dynamics to environmental change using repeat photography (Northern Ethiopia)

“…These data and other proxy data, for example Nile outflow (Hassan, 1981), indicate that droughts struck inter-tropical Africa frequently, and that drought was widespread in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Numerous severe droughts are also recorded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Northern Ethiopian Highlands during periods with low-active gullies and river channels: 1888-1892, 1895-1896, 1889-1900, 1913-1914, 1920-1922, and 1957(Pankhurst, 1985Webb et al, 1992).…”