Estimating the impact of inorganic fertilizer adoption on sesame productivity: evidence from Humera, Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

The major challenge in low-income countries is poor soil fertility that influences land productivity which results in food insecurity and poverty. To revert this inorganic fertilizer has been introduced in these countries to improve land productivity. However, how impactful is the application of this inorganic fertilizer towards improving sesame productivity dependents on socio-economic, crop types, institutional, and environmental factors. Thus, this study aims at analyzing the impacts of inorganic fertilizer adoption on sesame productivity in the Humera district. A household survey was administered to collect micro-level evidence from randomly selected 393 households using face-to-face interviews. Endogenous switching regression and propensity score matching models were employed to estimate the impact of inorganic fertilizer adoption on sesame productivity. Adoption of inorganic fertilizer is significantly influenced by years of farming experience, total farm size, educational status, household size, land ownership, an area under sesame cultivation, the practice of land fallow as soil management methods, and access to the off-farm activity. Adoption of inorganic fertilizer improved the probability of Sesame productivity by 15% for adopters and 26.1% for non-adopters had households decided to adopt.

Keywords

• inorganic fertilizer
• sesame productivity
• adoption impact
• endogenous switching regression
• ethiopia