Economy-wide effects of climate-smart agriculture in Ethiopia

A. Komarek, James Thurlow, Alessandro (Alex) De Pinto, H.-Y. Kwon and Jawoo Koo

No 277095, 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Promoting climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is now a common policy in many developing countries. Yet researchers rarely quantify CSA s economic value as opposed to traditional input-intensive technologies, particularly CSA s contribution to economy-wide indicators, such as economic growth and poverty reduction. This study applied a bioeconomic modeling approach to quantify the economy-wide effects of promoting CSA and traditional input-intensive technologies (fertilizer and irrigation) in Ethiopian cereal systems. We combined a cropping systems model with a computable general equilibrium model that was linked to a poverty module. We simulated the economy-wide effects for 40-year sequences of variable climate with and without climate change. Our results suggest that adopting CSA technologies (related to no tillage and integrated soil fertility management) on a quarter of Ethiopia s maize and wheat land (approximately 900,000 hectares) would increase national gross domestic product (GDP) by an average US $146 million annually and assist 367,000 people to move out of poverty. This benefit exceeds the GDP gain of US $95 million and poverty reduction of 105,000 people expected from a similarly-sized expansion of fertilizer and irrigation. Results also suggest that the gains from CSA are greater with climate change and that CSA improves stocks of soil organic carbon. Acknowledgement : The United Nations Development Programme funded part of this study. We thank Richard D. Robertson for providing the climate data.

Keywords: Environmental; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/277095/files/906.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economywide effects of climate‐smart agriculture in Ethiopia (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae18:277095

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.277095

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().