Tewodaj Mogues was analyzing data on how farmers in Ethiopia cope with disasters, such as drought, when a question arose in her mind: How could she understand the plight of the people without meeting them and interviewing them firsthand?

So began a journey for Mogues to reconnect with her roots. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Kenya and Germany, the doctoral candidate in the Agricultural and Applied Economics department at the UW-Madison, wanted to return to Ethiopia to sharpen her language skills and use her skills as a research economist. In the summer of 2003, she went to the field site in South Wello, Ethiopia to interview farmers.

Mogues was working on the project “Building Assets for Sustainable Recovery and Food Security,” under the auspices of BASIS, Broadening Access and Strengthening Input Market Systems, housed within the agricultural and applied economics department at UW-Madison.

The BASIS project in Ethiopia uses household surveys of farmers to determine how they cope with and recover from so-called “climatic shocks,” such as droughts. The ultimate goal of the project is to identify policies that help poor households retain assets during these shocks and improve access to markets in the recovery phase, thus avoiding recurrent cycles of poverty and reliance on food aid.

“My main interest is the extent to which farmers help each other formally and informally during drought, how interacting socially benefits them economically, ” said Mogues. “In order to do that, I needed to talk to the farmers and ask them clarification questions that were not found in the data set.”

The field site was an eight-hour drive by car straight north from the capital city of Addis Ababa to South Wello, in the mountains.

“I visited three villages representing the two main ethnic groups of the study area, Amhara and Oromo,” said Mogues, who speaks Amharic. “I was in the field one week, interviewing people from a diversity of households.
“What I discovered is that there are large differences between the ethnic groups in how socially connected rural households are and how they obtain social benefits. For example, the Oromo tradition is rich in kin and familial relations. What was particularly striking was that the households I talked to had family ties that extended across large distances, from outside the village to another country, Djibouti.”

These family ties become critical during weather shocks, when an entire area is devastated by drought, and neighbors cannot help one another.

“If there is a drought, people send livestock to relations who live farther away,” said Mogues. “The relatives maintain the animals, often for months at a time, then send them back later. They often retain the offspring as payment. This is a very typical way of coping.”

The Amhara, on the other hand, are not so well connected socially. Mogues discovered that food aid is their primary way of surviving hard times.

What determines a farmer”s wealth in Ethiopia? Oxen, land and other forms of income are the main determinants, according to Mogues. Female heads of households do not do as well as males, Mogues found. Their households tend to be smaller and they have to hire men to do the plowing, if they do”t have grown sons or other male relatives living with them.

“The main economic value of oxen is plowing power” said Mogues. “It takes two oxen to plow, so owning two oxen is considered being pretty well off because it makes you independent. Out of the 440 households in our data, 1/3 had no oxen and only a handful had more than two.”

Although oxen contribute to a farmer”s overall worth, Mogues said that other forms of income are also vital for prosperity. Seasonal labor in nearby cities provides wage income, which can help a household become more financially stable.

One of the goals of the project is for farmers to become more food secure, not relying on food aid for intermittent relief. Mogues said that food aid policy in Ethiopia occupies a big chunk of the food security-related policy issues there.

“When I interviewed the farmers, the conversation went to food aid quickly,” she said. “One issue is that if assets are important for long-term food security, does food aid provide discouragement or encouragement to accumulate assets?”

Mogues found that assets can work against a farmer who needs food aid in Ethiopia.”Oxen are seen as a measure of well-being,” Mogues said. “They are very visible. Some farmers complained about that because they were denied aid. The criteria for food aid are unclear.”

Mogues was also interested in finding out if the farmers in the South Wello region relied on credit of any kind. She discovered that although none of the farmers had credit from a bank, there is still a demand for credit.

“Much credit access is through relations or loans from the government,” Mogues said. There are two forms of loans: receiving cash from relatives in the city or an in-kind loan. For consumption, the loan would often be grain, such as wheat or barley. For investment, it would be cash.”

Getting away from number crunching in her office at UW-Madison and being able to talk to farmers and development workers in the land of her ancestors made Mogues appreciate the value of firsthand experience.
“This trip made me aware of the necessity for someone doing developmental economics to live in the developing country,” Mogues said. “You can”t do that solely by sitting in an office reading journal articles.”