Ethiopia’s economy is mainly dependent on agriculture. From its day to day consumption to export commodity, the contribution of agriculture takes the highest share. And the nation’s development plan also gives major emphasis to agriculture in order to support to the industrialization. However, the sector is struggling with a number of challenges which threaten nation’s development aspiration.
In line with governmental efforts to transform the sector, there are also some intuitions and organizations that are working on these major lifeline of the nation.
Among these institutions, the Ethiopian Science Academy (ESA) recently presented the findings of a research, specifically on mechanization of agriculture. Agriculture Researcher Dr. Melese Temesgen, overviewing the general features and history of agriculture mechanization, illustrated the major bottlenecks at the sector.
Ethiopia has about 111.5 million hectare land of total area and among this nearly 75 million hectare land is farmable. However, right now, only 13.5 million hectare land is employed for farming purpose, according to the findings of the research presented. With this amount of land exploitation, the nation’s agriculture sector contributes 80 percent of employment and 40 percent of gross domestic product. In addition to this, 80 percent of export earnings is also from agriculture.
Aybar Engineering PLC Director Dr. Melese who has been working for 35 years on agriculture, specifically farming technology, noted that currently, the sector encompasses 14.7 million farmer families and 13 million oxen.
He also noted that, while the features of lands of Ethiopia are characterized by ups and downs, hills, mountains and some significant parts of plain, most of agricultural activities are taking place on the plain areas only. Thus, the rest of the land is just unexploited. Because of this and other demographic factors, he mentioned that the plots of farmers are very much small and they are mostly producing consumable products than marketable ones; as a result, the farmers’ incomes remain low.
According to Dr. Melese the traditional farming system which employee’s animal power is believed to account more than 2000 years. Yet the focuses are mostly on improving these traditional farming systems, specifically by changing the plowing tool.
In these regard more than half of a century has been accounted and they are hardly achieved some changes in advancing farming activity. It was during Emperor Haile Silassie I, that introducing tractors on state mechanized farming was started. Consequent effort was also made during the military junta regime. He also emphasized that some of the efforts made in the last 27 years of EPRDF’s focus on labor intensive technologies and now the policy is more sympathetic for motor power employment.
Currently, the agriculture sector technology employees 20.5 percent of manpower used, 78.8 percent animal power and only 0.7 motorized machines. From these motorized machines, most of them are post farming machineries that are used to harvest the product, such as combiner, he mentioned in the presentation.
However, Dr. Melese tries to challenge such focuses of nation’s mechanization policy, which has planned to raise the level of Ethiopian agricultural mechanization from 0.3877 KW per hectare to 1 KW per hectare; with at least 50 percent derived from mechanical or electrical power and reduce the use of animal power for agricultural operations by 50 percent.
As of him, findings shows that using tractor instead of animal power is not increasing production and farmers who had both experience agreed that using animal power generates more production than tractor does. The other one is other countries’ experiences such as the farmers in Kenya. More recently, the number of farmers using tractors is decreasing; on the contrary, the number of farmers that are using oxen is increasing.
Likewise, Dr. Melese said that American farmers who have small size farming land prefers using animal power than tractors as the cost of fuel and inputs are increasing. Hence, he said, “Employing too much power or energy on agricultural operation by itself is not a guarantee for success.”
Dr. Melese also argues, “We have lands that possibly operated by tractors and also lands that are impossible to plow by tractor, because of its topography.” Thus, he suggests that the act of following conditional approaches than planning to replace 50 percent of animal power.
Emphasizing on animal power resources of Ethiopia, he said, “There are countries even can’t operate farming either by animal power or by tractors, because they lacked enabling climatic conditions for animal production and lives, and soil types or use of tractors. In this regard Ethiopia is blessed with animal resource and enabling climatic environment; therefore, it is better first of all to efficiently and effectively utilize this resource. There is also a need to modernize equipment’s that we are using with these animal powers, and then it is possible to apply motor power on enabling areas.”
The researcher also said that even if there are no other problems, the policy’s target seems more ambitious and unachievable. “For example, to replace 50 percent of animal power means to make 6.5 million oxen, and when we think this in Massey Ferguson 80 horse power tractors, it demands us about 300 thousand tractors, which means 16 billion USD, without calculating spare parts, maintenance and fuel or electricity cost,” he said.
Besides, it requires a number of homework’s, as majority of our farmers are working with small farming lands, he stressed. Therefore, he suggests the nation should first effectively and efficiently utilize its blessing, with modernizing input equipment.
During the presentation, concerning the mechanization of agriculture, there are academicians and researchers who have reservation on the idea of these research and call for more multi-dimensional research investigation, in order to come up with more dependable conclusions.
Herald December 11/2018
BY YOSEF KETEMA
