
It is proved that Ethiopia has abundant natural resources including vast arable lands, surface and underground water and excessive rainfall in the rainy season, mining, tourist destinations and others. Now the economy is heavily relied on agriculture in which land is its base. It is mainly practiced on subsistence level and critically subjected to the natural calamities.
In spite of its large natural resource base, the country faces grave land use challenges that need to be addressed by carefully considered comprehensive national land use policy, development of an integrated national land use plan and their implementation. Ethiopia’s population is highly agrarian, about 80% deriving their livelihood from the agricultural economy. The incidence of poverty is very high. A significant numbers of the population is malnourished and significant numbers of children unde rfive years are underweight.
As to the recent CSA report, the high population growth rate coupled with pervasive poverty is putting immense pressure on the natural resource base and ecological systems to provide food, fiber, timber and fuel wood, which is increasing unabated. The Population is projected to grow even more rapidly with the extension of improved health services and supply of potable water throughout the country. The threat of climate change and unreliable rainfall in the face of rising population that relies overwhelmingly on rain-fed agriculture exacerbates the vulnerability of peoples’ livelihoods.
The major land use challenge of Ethiopia is how to arrest and reverse the severe degradation of the natural resource base that is worsening unabated from decade to decade. The nature of this degradation, the improper and inefficient use of natural resources as well as the poor harnessing of the country’s land resources are contributing factors of the dwindling of natural resources.
About 95 percent of the nation’s cultivated area is used by smallholder farmers with holdings of less than 2 hectares. Severe population pressure in the highlands is forcing land fragmentation and expansion of agriculture into forests, steep hill and mountain sides and marginal areas. There is little room for further expansion. In many areas, an increasing proportion of the rural population put many to become landless.
According to the information obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture, rapid horizontal expansion of human settlements into fertile agricultural lands without proper planning and zoning is reducing cultivable land.
Yields of crops are very low compared to international standards. Agricultural production is mostly rain-fed. Only 3% of cropland is irrigated while a huge potential to develop 3.7 million hectare of irrigable land remains unharnessed. Fertilizer application is insignificant to the yield of cereals in addition to the utilization of improved seeds is negligible.
With frequent droughts, along with variability of rainfall and shortage of cultivable land and poor land management practices, millions of people are forced to survive by foreign handouts.
Poor soil and water conservation practices and high livestock overgrazing have led to accelerated soil erosion that now affects more than half of the cultivated area. Land degradation, manifested in the form of gully erosion and nutrient mining, affects more than 50% of the cultivated area, causing reduction of agricultural productivity and eroding farmers’ land degradation affects agriculture productivity.
The burning of dung as fuel instead of its use as a soil conditioner is considered to cause a reduction in grain production annually. The high sediment loads carried through the river system induce considerable negative impacts including sedimentation of dams, reservoirs and canals in irrigation schemes leading to reservoir storage loss, increased cost of removal of sediment in domestic water supply systems and damage to hydroelectric turbines and irrigation pumps.
As to the Ministry of Agriculture, livestock in the highland is reared on poor and degraded grasslands resulting from communal and private grasslands shrinkage due to expansion of croplands and overgrazing and decreasing carrying capacity of livestock.
In the highland areas, sources of feed for the livestock are mainly pastures and crop residues, communal grazing lands and aftermath grazing. In moisture stress areas of the highlands, feed and water shortage are severe problems for livestock and crops and animal feed resources development. In these areas, livestock suffer more than in moisture adequate areas and their performance and yield are also extremely poor.
In the moisture adequate areas, livestock feed sources are also similar with that of the moisture deficit areas but the land productivity due to good rain availability is better and makes feed availability and performance of the livestock much better. In the areas where major feed sources are limited, natural pastures, crop residues and aftermath grazing are the main feed sources and the performance of the livestock is relatively poor. Livestock in both areas, however, are primarily needed as a source of farm power and secondarily as providers of meat and milk for household food and source of income.
Rangeland ecosystems in lowland Ethiopia, occupied and used by agro-pastoralists and pastoralists, are under threat from several causes, including encroachment by highland farmers, conversion to plantation type irrigated state and private commercial farms for the production of cotton, fruits and sugarcane; droughts induced by climate change; and growing pastoral human and livestock population, in spite of shrinking critical riverine dry season grazing land appropriated for non-pastoral use. The growing livestock population has been squeezed into smaller space, resulting in overgrazing and deterioration of the quantity and quality of grazing and browsing feed resources.
The combined effect of shrinkage of grazing resources and population growth has reduced the per capita livestock holdings.
Degradation of natural vegetation cover in the form of deforestation is another manifestation of the level of resource degradation in Ethiopia. Although large parts of the country were covered by natural forests up until the 19th century, much has been lost through uncontrolled deforestation without replanting.
Much of the country is devoid of its woody vegetation. Except for some pocket areas (patches of remnant forest), much of the North, North Eastern, Central and Eastern part of the country, have lost their natural forest resources. Remnant natural forests do exist in the South, South Western and Western parts of the country. However, they are under stress of destruction and conversion mainly for small-scale and large-scale agriculture (private and state owned) and in some areas settlements (both legal and illegal), and urban centers.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, deforestation, which is mainly for expansion of rain fed agriculture, degrades large areas of lands per annum. What remains now is also under considerable stress. Overgrazing, expansion of smallholder agriculture as well as medium and large scale agricultural investments, timber extraction, collection of fuel wood and forest by-products such as honey, gums and raisins and expansion of human settlements are among the causes for deforestation.
The household energy requirements of the nation’s large and fast growing population are met almost entirely from traditional energy sources. Biomass energy at the national level provides huge percent of the total domestic energy consumption mostly derived from woody biomass, extensive crop residues, and from livestock dung. Electricity provides only four percent of energy consumption. This has serious implications for the depletion of the natural resource base.
The use of dung precludes its being used as manure and contribution to the soil nutrient pool, exacerbating low crop yields. The burning of crop residues precludes their use as livestock feed for a livestock population barely meeting its energy requirements for maintenance. All these factors have had drastic change with lasting adverse impact on the land cover, particularly in the last three decades which indicates a massive expansion of cultivated land at the expense of clearing forests, rangelands and wetlands. These changes in land use and land cover will have severe adverse economic, social and environmental implications.
It is vividly clear from all these that though the nation has abundant natural resources, due to the improper utilization and population pressure, it is dwindling. Hence, the ongoing tree planting and land management work should be strengthened.
BY ABEBE WOLDEGIORGIS
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD TUESDAY 4 FEBRUARY