WERABE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND NATURAL RESOURCE

Agricultural Economics Department

Course title: - Food and Agricultural Policy (AgEc 441)

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO FOOD SECURITY AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Objectives of the chapter: After going through this chapter, you should be in a position to::
1. Understand the Foundation, Definition and dimensions of food security
2. Explain the Principles and objectives of agricultural policy
3. Describe the Agricultural and food problems in developing country
4. Understand the Role of agriculture in poverty, food insecurity reduction and economic
development of developing countries

1. Definition, Foundation and dimensions of food security

Definition of Food Security

Food security is a flexible concept as reflected by the many attempts to define it in research and
policy usage. The concept of food security originated some 50 years ago, at a time of global food
crises in the early 1970s. Even two decades ago, there were about 200 definitions for food
security in published writings (Maxwell and Smith, 1992), showing the contextual dependent
features of the definition. The current widely accepted definition of food security came from the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) annual report on food security “The State of Food
Insecurity in the World 2001”: Food security [is] a situation that exists when all people, at all
times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets
their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO, 2002). The last
revision to this definition happened at the 2009 World Summit on Food Security which added a
fourth dimension – stability – as the short-term time indicator of the ability of food systems to
withstand shocks, whether natural or man-made (FAO, 2009).
According to the United Nations' Committee on World Food Security, food security is defined as
situation that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient,
safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and
healthy life.

Dimensions of Food Security

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO, identified the four
pillars/dimensions of food security as availability, access, utilization, and stability.

The WHO states that there are three pillars that determine food security: food availability, food
access, and food use and misuse. The FAO adds a fourth pillar: the stability of the first three
dimensions of food security over time. In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that
the "four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability". Two
additional pillars of food security were recommended in 2020 by the High Level Panel of
Experts for the Committee on World Food Security: agency and sustainability.

Availability:
Food availability relates to the supply of food through production, distribution, and exchange.
Food production is determined by a variety of factors including land ownership and use; soil
management; crop selection, breeding, and management; livestock breeding and management;
and harvesting. Crop production can be affected by changes in rainfall and temperatures. The use
of land, water, and energy to grow food often competes with other uses, which can affect food
production. Land used for agriculture can be used for urbanization or lost to desertification,
salinization, and soil erosion due to unsustainable agricultural practices. Crop production is not
required for a country to achieve food security. Nations do not have to have the natural resources
required to produce crops in order to achieve food security, as seen in many countries in the
world.
Because food consumers outnumber producers in every country, food must be distributed to
different regions or nations. Food distribution involves the storage, processing, transport,
packaging, and marketing of food. Food-chain infrastructure and storage technologies on farms
can also affect the amount of food wasted in the distribution process. Poor transport
infrastructure can increase the price of supplying water and fertilizer as well as the price of
moving food to national and global markets. Around the world, few individuals or households
are continuously self-reliant for food. This creates the need for a bartering, exchange, or cash
economy to acquire food. The exchange of food requires efficient trading systems and market
institutions, which can affect food security.

Access
Food access refers to the affordability and allocation of food, as well as the preferences of
individuals and households. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights noted
that the causes of hunger and malnutrition are often not a scarcity of food but an inability to
access available food, usually due to poverty. Poverty can limit access to food, and can also
increase how vulnerable an individual or household is to food price spikes. Access depends on
whether the household has enough income to purchase food at prevailing prices or has sufficient
land and other resources to grow its own food. Households with enough resources can overcome
unstable harvests and local food shortages and maintain their access to food.

There are two distinct types of access to food: direct access, in which a household produces food
using human and material resources, and economic access, in which a household purchases food
produced elsewhere. Location can affect access to food and which type of access a family will
rely on. The assets of a household, including income, land, products of labor, inheritances, and
gifts can determine a household's access to food.

Utilization:
The next pillar of food security is food utilization, which refers to the metabolism of food by
individuals. Once food is obtained by a household, a variety of factors affect the quantity and
quality of food that reaches members of the household. In order to achieve food security, the
food ingested must be safe and must be enough to meet the physiological requirements of each
individual. Food safety affects food utilization, and can be affected by the preparation,
processing, and cooking of food in the community and household. Nutritional values of the
household determine food choice, and whether food meets cultural preferences is important to
utilization in terms of psychological and social well-being. Access to healthcare is another
determinant of food utilization, since the health of individuals controls how the food is
metabolized. For example, intestinal parasites can take nutrients from the body and decrease
food utilization. Sanitation can also decrease the occurrence and spread of diseases that can
affect food utilization. Education about nutrition and food preparation can affect food utilization
and improve this pillar of food security.

Stability:
Food stability refers to the ability to obtain food over time. Food insecurity can be transitory,
seasonal, or chronic. In transitory food insecurity, food may be unavailable during certain
periods of time. At the food production level, natural disasters and drought result in crop failure
and decreased food availability. Civil conflicts can also decrease access to food. Instability in
markets resulting in food-price spikes can cause transitory food insecurity. Other factors that can
temporarily cause food insecurity are loss of employment or productivity, which can be caused
by illness. Seasonal food insecurity can result from the regular pattern of growing seasons in
food production.

Chronic (or permanent) food insecurity is defined as the long-term, persistent lack of adequate
food. In this case, households are constantly at risk of being unable to acquire food to meet the
needs of all members. Chronic and transitory food insecurity are linked, since the reoccurrence
of transitory food security can make households more vulnerable to chronic food insecurity.

Agency:
Agency refers to the capacity of individuals or groups to make their own decisions about what
foods they eat, what foods they produce, how that food is produced, processed and distributed
within food systems, and their ability to engage in processes that shape food system policies and
governance.
Sustainability:
Sustainability refers to the long-term ability of food systems to provide food security and
nutrition in a way that does not compromise the economic, social and environmental bases that
generate food security and nutrition for future generations.

Table 3.1: Summary of four main dimensions of food security

Availability Access Utilization Stability
 Domestic  Income, purchasing • Food safety and • Weather
production power, own quality variability,
 Import capacity production • Clean water seasonality
 Food stocks  Transport and • Health and sanitation • Price fluctuations

 • Food aid market infrastructure • Care, feeding and • Political factors

 Food distribution health-seeking • Economic factor
practices

2. Principles and objectives of agricultural policy

A basic rule of economic policy is that there must be at least as many instruments as there are
objectives. It is self-evident that where there is a single objective of policy, such as for example
to increase grain output in a country by a specific amount above the level likely with free-trade,
that at least one policy instrument would be required {i.e. rejection of freely competitive market
solutions requires at least one form of intervention to be employed). The instrument chosen
might be (1) one of several which would raise the price of grain received by producers, such as
an import tax or a production subsidy, (2) an instrument to reduce the cost of grain production,
such as an input subsidy or capital grant, or (3) it might, less plausibly, be an instrument which
reduces returns to products which compete with cereals for land, thus causing substitution of
resources into cereal production. It is in turn obvious; therefore, that more than one instrument
(some combination of the above) may be simultaneously employed to pursue a single objective.

Any country's policy towards the agricultural sector as a whole or towards one particular interest
group such as food consumers, grain producers or fertilizer manufacturers can be characterized
as consisting of three sets of elements, (1) objectives, (2) instruments of policy, and (3) rules
(principles) for operating instruments of policy. That is to say, a policy is usually framed in terms
of several simultaneous objectives, and involves several instruments which are applied according
to specific rules devised in order to achieve the objectives. It is the way in which the rules are set
for the operation of the instruments which determines the outcome of policy, and which thereby
controls the extent to which the different objectives are individually achieved. Among several
objectives of the agricultural policy; to support farmers' and farm workers' incomes, to increase
efficiency and agricultural productivity, to stabilize markets, to guarantee regular supplies
(which may be interpreted as signifying an attachment to achieving an unspecified degree of self-
sufficiency in food supplies), and of ensuring reasonable prices to consumers. This main set of
objectives is supplemented by others relating to assisting farming and rural communities in more
remote and otherwise disadvantaged regions (what might be termed a regional dimension of
policy), and to protecting specific habitats and landscapes (an environmental dimension). In
pursuit of the whole set of objectives many different policy instruments are employed. These
(which are explained more fully below) include variable import levies with minimum import
prices, export subsidies, intervention buying to support prices, production quotas to control
output, deficiency payments, production subsidies, investment grants, import quotas and tariffs,
plus a range of measures to help dispose of and manage surplus production. As circumstances
will change new instruments of policy can be added, old ones will be scrapped, and the rules of
operation also be changed so as to achieve a new balance between objectives.

3. Agricultural and food problems in developing country

Until the early 1980's, agriculture was viewed in many developing countries primarily as a
support sector that provided raw materials and a tax base to generate capital for industrial
investment. To satisfy politically influential urban consumers, governments in many developing
countries set retail food prices artificially low. Low food prices induced many farmers to cut
back on production. These countries then relied on imports to alleviate short-term shortages in
domestic food supplies.

During the last decade, growing budget deficits in many developing countries forced the
governments to reassess their policies. Many countries liberalized agricultural markets and
eliminated production and marketing controls in an effort to stimulate production. Elimination of
retail price controls has pushed up prices for domestically grown food. Devaluations of exchange
rates have made imported foods more expensive, further pressuring prices for domestically
grown foods upward. Thus far, these higher prices have not been enough to overcome other
factors limiting agricultural production in most of poorer countries.
These policy changes made food less affordable for many-increasing the nutritional vulnerability
of the people in these areas. Rising food prices in many developing countries have not been
matched by an increase in purchasing power of their citizens.

Poorly designed efforts to expand agricultural production can lead to unintended negative effects
on food security by compromising food utilization. For example, expanded agricultural
production may increase demands on women’s time for agricultural tasks, which can lead
mothers to devote less time to child care (resulting in poorer child health). Irrigation schemes
may result in more standing water and consequently growing populations of disease vectors such
as mosquitoes and agricultural workers may face greater exposure to pesticides. In each case, the
resulting poorer health can lead to poorer food utilization and hence greater malnutrition. The
solution is not to avoid agricultural growth, but to recognize that food security is determined by
factors broader than just agricultural production; consequently, efforts to expand agricultural
production need to take these other factors into account.
These considerations notwithstanding, increasing broad-based agricultural production is critical
to improving long-term food security in most low-income countries, not only to increase food
availability, but also to increase incomes of the poor (both in agriculture and related
nonagricultural enterprises) in order to increase their economic access to food and to provide the
economic growth necessary to finance the educational and health services critical to improving
food utilization. The central challenge is to do so in a way that not only fosters improved food
access, availability and utilization in the long run but is consistent with responding to short-run
crises of food insecurity.
Ethiopian agriculture has been suffering from various external and internal problems. It has been
stagnant due to poor performance as a result of factors such as low resource utilization; low-tech
farming techniques (e.g. wooden plough by oxen and sickles); over-reliance on fertilizers and
underutilized techniques for soil and water conservation; inappropriate agrarian policy;
inappropriate land tenure policy; ecological degradation of potential arable lands; and increases
in the unemployment rate due to increases in the population.

Agriculture progresses technologically as farmers adopt innovations. The extent to which

farmers adopt available innovations and the speed by which they do so determine the impact of
innovations in terms of productivity growth. It is a common phenomenon that farmers like any
other kind of entrepreneurs do not adopt innovations simultaneously as they appear on the
market. Diffusion typically takes a number of years, seldom reaches a level of 100% of the
potential adopters population and mostly follows some sort of S-shaped curve in time.
Apparently, some farmers choose to be innovators (first users), while others prefer to be early
adopters, late adopters or non-adopters. Despite the fact that many areas of the economy have
made progress, the livelihoods of small-scale farmers are still constrained by many impeding
factors. The salient constraints include: small and diminishing farm lands due to large family
sizes and rapid population growth; soil infertility with decreasing yield-per-hectare ratios; on-
field and post-harvest crop pests; unpredictable patterns of rain; input scarcity and outdated
technologies leading to low outputs; shortage of capital; reduced market access; lack of market
information; outbreaks of animal diseases and shortages of animal feed; and declining price
structures

4. Role of agriculture in poverty and food insecurity reduction

There is a lot of evidence that agriculture can contribute to poverty reduction beyond a direct
effect on farmer's incomes. Agricultural development can stimulate economic development
outside of the agricultural sector, and lead to higher job and growth creation. Increased
productivity of agriculture raises farm incomes, increases food supply, reduces food prices, and
provides greater employment opportunities in both rural and urban areas. Higher incomes can
increase the consumer demand for goods and services produced by sectors other than agriculture.
Such linkages (or the 'multiplier effect') between growth in the agricultural sector and the wider
economy has enabled developing countries to diversify to other sectors where growth is higher
and wages are better.
The general pattern for least developed countries that diversify and reduce poverty is:
 Early stage: agriculture is a large share of gross domestic product (GDP) and food is a
high percentage of the poor's expenditure.
 Agricultural growth contributes to wider growth and poverty reduction, to what degree is
dependent on the changes in productivity and the size of farms. Increases in land and
labour productivity can be central to pro-poor growth. Initially land and labour
productivity must rise to reduce poverty, but land productivity should rise faster... to
create additional employment on farms which benefits the poor and leads to demand for
non-farms goods and services.
 As growth increases, there are more employment opportunities outside of agriculture, and
labour moves outside of agriculture thus wage rates for farm labourers rise. At this stage,
it is important to increase labour productivity to maintain food supply and prices. DFID
(2005)
Agricultural productivity can therefore be seen as a first step or engine of growth leading to
greater income for a country. It is interesting to note that historically no poor countries have
reduced poverty only through agriculture, but almost none have achieved it without increasing
agricultural productivity in the first instance. Agricultural growth is an essential complement to
growth in other sectors (DFID 2005).

Agriculture has a much greater impact on reducing poverty and improving food security than the
other sectors of the economy. The agricultural sector plays a strategic role in improving the
availability of food and achieving food security. However, while there is general agreement on
the increased global demand for food to be expected in the coming decades, there is uncertainty
surrounding global agriculture’s capacity to service this demand through an expansion in the
food supply. Better food provision ensured by increasing the productivity of agriculture and
expanding the range of agricultural land use seems to be a possible method to eradicate hunger.
However, in the case of low-income developing countries the existing technology and
knowledge will not enable them to produce all the food needed and beyond. It shows the need to
expand investments in agricultural research and extension systems both in and for developing
countries to increase the productivity of agricultural production per unit of land and per
agricultural worker. For Sub-Saharan Africa, it was discussed by Otsuka and based on these
 studies, it can be clearly implied that it is necessary to focus on investments that will push
African agriculture toward higher productivity without severe environmental degradation.
Technology transfer from developed to developing countries should be facilitated to support
these processes, to eliminate technology gaps and to overcome knowledge barriers.

5. Role of agriculture in economic development of developing countries

Beginning in the 1960s, a major revision in development thinking argued for a central role for
agriculture as a driver of growth, especially in the early stages of industrialization. This view of
agriculture as having an active role, stimulated in large part by the emerging experience in Asia,
was founded on two core contributions. First, it was recognized that traditional agriculture could
be transformed rapidly into a modern sector through the adoption of science-based technology,
thereby making a large contribution to overall growth. Second, economists now explicitly
identified the strong growth linkages and multiplier effects of agricultural growth to the
nonagricultural sectors. Agriculture has strong, direct forward linkages to agricultural processing
and backward linkages to input-supply industries. It is known empirically that a large share of
manufacturing in the early stages of development is agriculturally related. Because of these
strong growth linkage effects, agricultural growth can lead wider economic growth in many
countries during their early stages of industrialization.
The essential interrelations between the agricultural and other sectors of the economy were
illuminated by economists who demonstrated the crucial importance of agricultural growth for
rapid national economic development. Studies also showed that these linkages between the
sectors increase with economic growth. not only are increased flows of products from agriculture
necessary to support growth in other sectors, but agriculture in turn requires certain resources
from other sectors for increased growth.
Contribution of Agriculture to Other Sectors
The essential contributions of agriculture to other sectors for accelerated economic growth are:
 Increases in the production of food and other agricultural products for urban domestic use
and for export
 The supply of additional labor to nonagricultural sectors
 A net out flow of capital investment in other sectors; and
  An increase in consumer demand in the agricultural sector for the goods and services
produced in other sectors.
Contributions of Other Sectors to Agriculture
More rapid growth in the agricultural sector requires the following contributions of other sectors
to agriculture:
 The industrial production of improved farm inputs, such as chemical fertilizer and
pesticides and capital equipment, including farm machinery, pumps, and irrigation
equipment
 An increased demand for food and other agricultural products from both increased
income and the shift of a greater proportion of the labor force to non-agricultural sectors;
 The provision of needed infrastructure, such as roads, transportation equipment, and
communications, as well as education.
In sum, there is no doubt that agriculture contributes to economic growth in many ways. Major
contributions from agriculture to the overall economic growth are summarized as follows:
product contribution, market contribution and factor contribution.
 Product contribution of agriculture refers to the fact that agriculture must supply food
above subsistence needs in order to feed labor working in alternative occupations. It is
believed that the first type of contribution of agriculture to the economic growth of a
country is that constituted by growth of product within the sector itself.
 A market contribution of agriculture refers to the fact that the demand from agriculture
must be the major source of autonomous demand for industrial goals. If industry is to
grow and prosper it must be able to sell its goods. Agriculture makes a market
contribution to economic growth by purchasing some production items from other sectors
and selling some of its products, not only to pay for purchases but also to purchase
consumer goods from other sectors
 Agriculture makes factor contribution to economic growth when there is transfer of
resources from agriculture to other sectors of the economy. Growth in agriculture makes
a product contribution, if it trades with others; it renders a market contribution, if it
transfers resources to other sectors. The factor contribution of agriculture consists of two
parts: a labor contribution and a capital contribution.
CHAPTER 2: OVERVIEW OF AGRICULTURAL AND FOOD POLICY IN ETHIOPIA

Objectives of the chapter: - at the end of this chapter students will able to:
1. Understand the Agricultural Policy of Ethiopia
2. Explain the Food Security Policy in Ethiopia

2.1 Agricultural Policy in Ethiopia

Agricultural policies in both developed and developing countries have been employed to increase
agricultural productivity and production, social welfare and redistribute incomes (McKay et al.
1998). Countries use agricultural policies to achieve self-sufficiency, transfer income among
economic agents, and secure food supplies and low prices to consumers. Industrial countries
adopt agricultural policies to raise agricultural product prices above market prices that transfer
income from consumers to farmers while; developing countries employ agricultural policies to
reduce agricultural product prices below market prices that provide cheap food for consumers
(Krueger et al. 1988).

In Ethiopia, development Plan has been documented since the 1950s. During the period 1950–
1974, the political arena was characterized by absolute monarchism (royalism). In the economic
sphere, markets were the driving forces in resource allocation, Welteji Agric & Food Secur
(2018).
According to Dejene Aredo, agriculture was also discriminated against by sectoral policies. The
First Five-Year Development Plan placed emphasis on raising foreign exchange earnings by
improving coffee cultivation, accounting for over 70% of foreign exchange earnings. Similarly,
the Second Five-Year Development plan added to its priorities on the establishment of large-
scale commercial farms and neglected cereal production from subsistence farmers which
accounted more than 80% of the cultivated area in the 1950s and 1960s. However, shortages of
food in the late 1960s shifted the attention of policy makers to agriculture and priority was given
in the Third Five-Year Plan without modifications to the overall growth strategy.

During the 1974–1991 periods, however, the political environment favored collective and state
farms at the expense of individual farmers. Distorted macroeconomic policies, political unrest
and massive villagization and settlement programs undermined the contribution that the rural
development policies could have made.

The post-1991 period has also documented different development programs like Agricultural-
Led Industrialization (ADLI), the Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program
(SDPRP), Participatory and Accelerated Sustainable Development to Eradicate poverty
(PASDEP) and consecutive growth and transformation plans (GTP I and II). But, the
interventions are not accessed by all segments of the society, limited to certain geographical
areas in terms of coverage and constrained by different institutional factors.

During this period, the government of Ethiopia has imposed restrictions on exports of cereal
crops to stabilize domestic supply and encourage oilseed, pluses, and coffee exports that have
either a positive or negative impact on social welfare. The government has used agricultural
export policies in the form of export taxes and export bans on different agricultural commodities.
The tax on coffee export was abolished in 2002 following declining coffee prices in the
international markets. The government banned the export of major food grains to reduce the food
price for urban consumers. The domestic grain prices were tried to reduce through banning the
exportation of teff, wheat, maize and sorghum in December 2006. In June 2008, banning is
applied to the exportation of all cereals (Admassie 2015). The oilseed and pulses have been freed
from export taxes (Rashid et al. 2009). The Ethiopian government has used overvalued exchange
rates to tax farmers and promote oilseed, pluses and coffee exports that increase costs of
agricultural production.

Agricultural markets have been liberalized in favor of market mechanisms for allocating
resources. The fertilizer markets were liberalized to move the fertilizers from sources to the
farmers or ultimate users. The government deregulated the prices of fertilizers at the wholesale
and retail levels. Input subsidies were abolished to reduce the government budget deficit. Liberal
input and product prices did not lead to competitive markets due to the government’s continued
intervention in the commodity markets and financial markets from 2000 to 2007. Private
companies exited from the fertilizer markets in 2000. The government of Ethiopia has authorized
monopsonies and monopolies’ powers to Agricultural Input Supply Enterprise to import and
distribute fertilizers in 2005. Like private companies, this enterprise has imported pesticides and
herbicides and distributed these inputs to farmers through cooperatives. Some of the agricultural
inputs, such as pesticides, herbicides, tractors and combine harvesters have been imported and
distributed to farmers by private companies. Cooperatives are given monopoly’s power to
distribute fertilizers to farmers (Habte et al. 2020).

These policies tend to underestimate the role of technology and information markets that can
determine agricultural productivity. For instance, government interventions in output markets,
and input markets did not address the shortage of agricultural commodities, and stop upward
trending of agricultural prices. Because these policies have ignored the roles of information
market on the status of macro and micro-nutrients in soil and rates of technology usages in
accelerating agricultural productivity, as observed by Schneider et al. (2011) and Habte et al.
(2020). Rapid growth in agricultural productivity is strongly associated with well function of
agricultural technology and information markets. Neoclassical theory suggests that well-
functioning knowledge and information markets are necessary to increase productivity. But, this
theory does not work in developing countries assuming knowledge and technologies are freely
available within countries, to all producers. As a result, the government of Ethiopia could not
achieve intended targets using these policies. Thus, precision agriculture policy is necessary to
create information markets on the status of macro and micro-nutrients in soil and rates of
technology usages in Ethiopia. These new markets provide both adequate flows of information to
farmers regarding macro and micro-nutrients testing facilities and technology usage rating
facilities. Incentives should be adequate to confirm that private sectors invest their capital in
technological infrastructure.

2.2 Food Security Policy in Ethiopia

The issue of ensuring food security has become the agenda of concern across all over the globe
especially for low income countries with high population growth rate. So far, a number of efforts
have been made by governmental and non-governmental organization to reduce food-insecurity
problems in Ethiopia and moreover, a number of food security/insecurity targeted studies have
been conducted under different geographical locations of Ethiopia.

Food and nutrition security (FNS) policies shape the governance of FNS through the institutional
setting, instruments and law-enforcement choices. As part of its national growth agenda, the
government of Ethiopia has implemented several strategies and programs to guarantee food and
nutrition security, namely the food security strategy, national nutrition strategy and program, the
Seqota Declaration roadmap, nutrition sensitive agriculture strategy, school health and nutrition
strategy, and the Productive Safety Net Program through multi-sectoral nutrition coordination
and integration. The ADLI policy highlights the substantial role of agricultural transformation to
guarantee food security in Ethiopia. It focuses on the promotion of integrated rural-development
approaches to agricultural growth in the peasant farming systems. A range of policies have
resulted in a supportive macroeconomic system, enhancement of rural households’ welfare,
deregulation of markets for farm commodities, and fostering the intensification of production of
food staples through the use of high yielding variety seeds and fertilizers. Through the Plan for
Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP) 2005/06 to 2009/10,
Ethiopia attained agricultural development-led economic growth. The objectives for the existing
Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) 2010/11–2014/15 is to sustain or outperform an average
GDP growth rate of 11% and substantially address chronic food insecurity. The Agriculture
Growth Program (AGP) 2010–2015 aimed at fostering productivity, market performance, and
processing along the entire value chain of major products

Ethiopia’s Food Security Strategy (FSS) provides a main framework covering the food safety
and quality. An effective food safety system is vital to safeguard the community from unsafe
food consumption and induce economic performance from agricultural products. The food
quality and safety administration system in Ethiopia has been subjected to sustained manifold
advancements predominantly during the last decade regarding enforcement of adequate food
safety laws and regulations, settlement of independent public entities to govern and define
standards pertaining to food safety and plant and animal health. The origin of standardization in
Ethiopia dated from early 1950s when the country’s economy was detrimentally affected by
deficiency of pertinent standards for food, water supplies, and other commodities. The major
legislations ruling food safety, animal and plant health comprise of Plant Quarantine Laws and
Regulations; Animal Diseases Prevention and Control Laws and Regulations; Food, Medicine,
and Health Care Administration and Control Laws and Regulations. The latter, which is a more
inclusive and elaborated regulatory system pertaining to efficient management and regulation of
food, medicine and health care was authorized and mandated in Parliamentary Proclamation
(Proclamation No. 661/2009) and the Council of Ministers (Regulation No. 189/2010).
These legislations reinforce the prior food regulatory system and address specifically the
development of standards, licensing, and regulation for locally produced and imported foods, in
areas including production, promotion, storage, packaging and labeling, distribution, and
laboratory testing. Although that enforcement of food safety policies is essentially bound to
normative regulations regarding imported and exported food and agricultural products, such
legislations do not cover all segments of foods and food products supplied to the people. In
Ethiopia, chronic food insecurity is addressed more particularly by the Productive Safety Net
Program (PSNP), which has formed the backbone of safety net activities in the country. The
adoption of the Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP) in 2005 has resulted in thorough
changes in the perception of Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) and the policy options and
mechanisms selected. The PSNP added a social perspective into this predominantly agricultural
and economic growth related challenges. The strategic objective of the PSNP is to build a
platform for household investment, avert resources depletion, foster community assets, and
emancipate the overwhelmingly chronically food insecure households from recurrent emergency
food relief to a more secure, predictable, productive, and systematic form of social protection.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)-led impact measurement indicated that
PSNP is well targeted and has enhanced food security and expenditures of the disadvantaged
households in chronically food insecure districts (woredas). However, the introduction of cash
transfers raised several challenges. In some woredas, cash transfers contributed to food price
inflation in the initial years of PSNP. It also failed to address food price seasonality, and adjust
food price inflation to the extent that recipient preferences shifted from cash transfers back to
food aid as food prices rose and the real value of cash fell. Moreover, the impact evaluation
highlighted the challenges of women to equilibrate their engagement in the public works
program with household chores, and their limited access to development agents.