Food security and social protection in highland Ethiopia:

Exploring the links between land and the PSNP

Tom LaversDepartment of Social and Policy Sciences

University of BathDSA Annual Conference 3rd November 2012

The Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)

• Food insecurity framed as a naturally occurring phenomenon

• Food Security Programme comprises:– PSNP– Extension packages– Capital-intensive investments– Resettlement

• Together aim to achieve ‘graduation’

The land policy

• State land ownership to protect smallholders against market forces

• Key feature of smallholder-based development strategy

• Key assumption that households have access to adequate agricultural inputs, especially land

Geblen, Tigray

• Very food insecure site• Drought prone, mountainous topography,

severely eroded• Fieldwork: 56 semi-structured interviews in

March and April 2010• Geblen included in the Ethiopian Rural

Household Survey (ERHS)

Households’ access to agricultural inputs

  Percentage of respondents

‘Ideal’ set of inputs (1ha, of which 0.5ha irrigated; male labour; pair oxen)

0

Some land but no male labour 35

Land and labour but no ox 14

Basic set of inputs (some land; male labour; one ox)

51

Source: ERHS

Food shortages

Source: ERHS

The Food Security Programme and graduation

• No resettlement programme, no capital-intensive investments

• Extension packages focused on livestock, but unsuited to local conditions

• PSNP Participants forced to take packages• But local government officials admit there is

no chance of graduation given local conditions

Social protection and migration

• Despite problems of agricultural production, local government use land and PSNP to limit migration

• ‘the sense of the PSNP is to make people stay for a period of time’

• Government fears the ‘urbanisation of rural poverty’ and frames migration as the ‘source of economic, political and social instabilities’

Conclusions

• PSNP used to support the failing land and agricultural development policies

• Land and the PSNP used to limit urban migration

• The PSNP is used to support the political objectives of the land policy

• Need to link analysis of cash transfer programmes to broad socioeconomic and political contexts