Money to burn? Costs & benefits of drought responses

A simple economic model was used to compare the aid costs of two approaches to supporting pastoralist households during drought in Ethiopia. One approach was the timely commercial destocking, enabling households to acquire cash through livestock sales to private traders and to use the cash to buy food and inputs to protect key livestock assets. The other approach was to provide food aid, meeting household food requirements but with loss of key livestock assets, and post-drought to continue food aid along with restocking. The results showed that the aid cost of commercial destocking was 125 times lower than the food-aid/restocking option when local food was used and 137 lower than imported food aid. More …

Posted on 15 May 2012 in News, Pastoralism & Marketing, Pastoralism, Policy & Power