Fertilizer Use by Smallholder Households in Northern Ethiopia

As a number of previous chapters have noted, land degradation due to soil erosion and nutrient depletion poses serious challenges for farmers in the developing world. Ethiopia has one of the highest nutrient depletion rates in sub-Saharan Africa (Stoorvogel and Smaling 1990), a situation nowhere more evident than in the highlands of Tigray Regional State in northern Ethiopia (Gebremedhin 1998; Hagos et al. 1999). Fertilizer use in Tigray is also estimated to be one of the lowest in the country and therefore in the world (Hagos et al. 1999).