Abstract:
Poverty has remained to be one of the major development challenges in Ethiopia. This research investigates the impacts of agricultural technology adoption on poverty reduction in rural Ethiopia. To this end, boosting agricultural production and productivity through the adoption of modern agricultural technologies is the main solution. However, in most of the rural areas of Ethiopian farmers adoption rate is very low. As a result, the study focused on analyzing the determinants of adoption of agricultural technologies (such as organic and inorganic fertilizer, herbicide technology packages) and their implied impact on poverty reduction. The study used ESS-LSMS-IAS cross-sectional data which was collected from 2316 rural Ethiopian households from Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and SNNP regions during 2015/16. The study employed MNL and MESM regression models to achieve the study's objective. The results of MNL showed that farm household's decision to adopt farm technologies is mainly influenced by household socioeconomic characteristics, access to information and infrastructure facility, institutional factors, plot characteristic, and geographic locations. The results obtained from MESM revealed that adopters of any technology packages used in the study have higher per adult food and total consumption per annum, and this confirms that adoption of agricultural technologies has a direct and significant impact on household's consumption and on poverty reduction for the rural poor in Ethiopia. Moreover, the adoption of a combination of alternative technologies provides higher annual per adult food and total consumption as compared to adopting a single agricultural technology. The study recommends the need of a comprehensive policy framework to tackle the socioeconomic, institutional, infrastructure and other constraints to promote the adoption of agricultural technologies and to reduce poverty in rural Ethiopia. The government should also promote a combined adoption of technologies than adoption in single.