A Review on “Vertisol Management, Challenges and Future Potential for Food Self- Sufficiency in Ethiopia”

Abstract

Ethiopia, the second populous country in Africa next to Nigeria, located 9.145⁰N, 40.4897⁰E latitude and longitude respectively was a sub-Saharan African country. Agriculture is the main stay of the nation economy and Eighty five per cent of the population engaged in this sector at subsistence level. In Ethiopia recurrent drought, low land productivity, population pressure, flooding, Rural-urban migration, poor saving trends, lack of infrastructure, poor rural asset base, low education and technological levels were the factors to prolong the time for achieving food self-sufficiency. The government's absolute prime concern is ensuring food self-sufficiency at both national and household level. So it is essential that, parallel to its activity of scaling up the productivity of small farmers with traditional farming systems, the government must introduce and implement modern agriculture systems through credit and extension services to increase food production and enable the agricultural sector to play its crucial role in achieving food self-sufficiency and other economic developments. From those modern agriculture systems vertisols management is the one future potential to boost crops productivity consequently to achieve food self-sufficiency with simple technologies and less expenses by exploiting the under-utilized land resource. So, different sources such as journals, proceedings, thesis works, symposium and annual reports have been reviewed in this paper to emphasize the role of vertisol management for food self-sufficiency in Ethiopia to enable getting attention by decision makers.

Keywords: Vertisols management, Food Self-sufficiency, Ethiopia.