Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment

Farm productivity and poverty in Kenya: The effect of soil conservation

Author(s):

Jane Kabubo-Mariara ^*, Germano Mwabu, Peter Kimuyu

Recieved Date: 2005-12-10, Accepted Date: 2006-03-21

Abstract:

Soil erosion and land degradation have become major environmental concerns and present a formidable threat to food security and sustainability of agricultural production in Kenya. The biggest challenge currently facing the Kenyan government is how to achieve the triple developmental goals of food sufficiency, better nutrition and poverty reduction without increasing the land devoted to food crops. This paper responds to a paucity of empirical information on the impact of land degradation on farm productivity and poverty in Kenya. The paper builds on the few existing studies in this area and explores the impact of conventional inputs and adoption of soil conservation practices on farm yields per acre controlling for the effects of institutional factors. Panel data collected from farming households is utilized to achieve the study objectives. The paper tests and rejects the hypothesis that adoption of soil conservation practices has no effect on farm productivity or on poverty reduction. We test this hypothesis controlling for impacts of conventional farm inputs and institutional factors notably the property rights regimes. Due to the joint determination of soil conservation practices and productivity, we use the fixed effects – instrumental variables (FE-IV) method to isolate the productivity effects of soil conservation. We further simulate the impact of key policy changes on productivity on one hand and on poverty (head count ratio) on the other. The key finding of the paper (from the FE-IV) is that controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, soil conservation has a large measurable impact on farm productivity and on poverty reduction in the long-run. We also find that well specified property rights areassociated with higher farm productivity, a debate that is widely contested in the literature. Policy simulations indicate that privatization of common land and adoption of particular soil conservation practices can play a decisive role in increasing agricultural yields and in reducing poverty in semi-arid areas.

Keywords:

Productivity, poverty, land conservation, Kenya

---

Journal: Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment
Year: 2006
Volume: 4
Issue: 2
Category: Environment
Pages: 291-297

---

Full text for Subscribers

---

Information:

Note to users

The requested document is freely available only to subscribers/registered users with an online subscription to the Journal of Food, Agriculture & Environment. If you have set up a personal subscription to this title please enter your user name and password. All abstracts are available for free.

Article purchasing

If you like to purchase this specific document such as article, review or this journal issue, contact us. Specify the title of the article or review, issue, number, volume and date of the publication. Software and compilation, Science & Technology, all rights reserved. Your use of this website details or service is governed by terms of use. Authors are invited to check from time to time news or information.

---

Purchase this Article:   20 Purchase PDF Order Reprints for 15

---

Share this article :