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Is Poverty Driving Borana Herders in Southern Ethiopia to Crop Cultivation?

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Abstract

This study addresses whether or not crop cultivation by Borana herders in southern Ethiopia is motivated by poverty since 80% of the households belong to poor wealth classes (i.e., poor, very poor and destitute). Yet our findings showed little evidence that Borana communities have become self-sufficient in grain production. Compared to wealthy households, poor households generally cultivated the least land and sampled households, producing yields only 31% of the Ethiopian national average. Grain per capita met only 26% of the annual requirement per person, equivalent to three to four months of self-sufficiency per household. The livelihood response model (LRM) developed for testing the relationship between extent of croplands and household wealth showed that poverty alone cannot be motivating herders to cultivate crops. Factors such as shortage of labor, lack of sufficient traction animals, and unreliable rainfall also need to be considered. Crop cultivation has not enabled self-sufficiency, but it has resulted in fragmented grazing lands. Future policies address changes in land use, including improving soil fertility through manure-nutrient transfers, by promoting better integration of crop cultivation and pastoralism. Research is needed to (a) understand household time allocation between crop cultivation and livestock management, (b) improve the LRM by considering temporal variability in the wealth of households and extent of cultivated lands, and (c) understand the role of poverty in motivating the adoption of alternative livelihood coping strategies.

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Notes

  1. Rainfall is highly seasonal, divided between the long rains (ganna) from March to May, the interim cool period (adoolessa), the short rains (hagayya) from September to October, and followed by the very hot and dry season (bona hagayyaa) from November to March. The hagayya rains are always unreliable, creating periods of extended dryness, even during non-drought years.

  2. The Borana Oromo community uses gada time to record ritual performance, social and political passage, age, marriage, and to organize child naming and ceremonies for the dead, among other rituals. Using this method Legesse (1973), reconstructed a 400 year event calendar. The use of gada time in recall data has been shown to be empirically sound for gathering baseline information and monitoring household production in rural environments where written records do not exist. In this study, we concentrated on a few decades within the memory of the living population.

  3. The wealth ranks are based on the Borana’s own descriptions of wealth distribution. Wealthy households (duuresa ciccitaa) have an estimated 179 TLU household-1; rich (dureessa) have 58 TLU household-1; self-reliant (nama ufirraa bulu) have 30 TLU household-1; transitional (harka qalleessa—‘has weaker capacity’) have 11 TLU household-1; poor (deega) have 7 TLU household-1; very poor (deega bombii) have 5 TLU household-1; and destitute (qollee guutuu hiikanaa) have less than 2 TLU household-1.

  4. Deduced from interviews

  5. From key informants we deduced that over 26 years of farming history (1980–2006), the community had achieved successful harvests only 19% of the time.

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Acknowledgments

Funding for the research was provided by the Norwegian Research Council (Project no. 16139/S30). Three referees on the earlier version of the paper made constructive suggestions which helped us to improve the clarity of the paper.

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  1. Noragric, Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, PO Box 5003, Ås, 1432, Norway

    Boku Tache & Gufu Oba

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  1. Boku Tache
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  2. Gufu Oba
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Correspondence to Gufu Oba.

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Tache, B., Oba, G. Is Poverty Driving Borana Herders in Southern Ethiopia to Crop Cultivation?. Hum Ecol 38, 639–649 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9349-8

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