Implication of Animal Feed and Water Scarcity on Labor Allocation, Food Production and Per Capita Food Consumption in Tigrai Region, Ethiopia

Inadequate quantity and quality of animal water and feed resources are major factors limiting the productivity of livestock farming in Ethiopia. It is common that households spend a considerable share of their daily time to search for theses scarce resources by displacing available labor time away from more productive farming activities and leisure consumption. This paper examines the impact of time spent looking for animal water and grazing feeds on households¡¯ agricultural food production and per capita food consumption expenditure using NMBU-MU Tigrai Rural Household Survey of 518 sample farmers. To address our objectives, we employ IV 2SLS for estimating per capita food consumption expenditure and double log for estimating food production drawing on non-separable farm household model. Our results do support the hypothesis of a negative relationship between total household labour input to crop farming and resource scarcity. Likewise, the findings confirm that reducing time spent looking for water leads to an increase in food production, per capita food consumption, and food security. In addition for the median household, the total impact revealed that decreasing searching time for water, grazing and collecting time for straw leads to an increment in food security. The results from the quantile regression further proved that the effect of these scarce resources is not uniform across the food production and consumption distribution. In line with our suspicion, the income variable was found to be endogenous and instrumental variables for it were statistically significant and bear the expected signs.