Land and heterogenous constraints nexus income diversification strategies in Ethiopia: systematic review

Background: Agriculture is a key to Africa’s future. With alarming population growth, the quest for land increases not only for farming, but also for housing, and the building of industries. Likewise, Ethiopian highlands, cultivated landholding sizes are very small and the land-to-man ratio is declining over time. This exposes the young rural population to facing severe land constraints, poverty, and food insecurity. In addition, constraints facing rural households are inevitably varied and diverse. Hence, this paper examines an in-depth and systematic review of how the rural economy responds to the existing land constraints and what specifically drives them for income diversification outlooks; accumulative or survival strategies in the spatial and temporal dimensions. Method: We have used a systematic review with concept definitions and a qualitative approach that relies on the analysis of current literature and deductive logical reasoning to generate a comprehensive scientific understanding of a topic that can capitalize information for future research and policies. Different inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied and filtered pertinent articles to this study in countrywide verdicts. Result: The burgeoning literature underscores farm sizes are strongly and positively correlated with net farm income and overall livelihood options, and land constraint leads to rural poverty. One of the pressing issues in rural, as well as urban areas, is that millions of small-scale farmers are becoming landless, and forced as daily laborers for other income sources or joining the already massively overloaded urban and peri-urban low-productivity services sector. In addition, skill, capital (financial and physical), and multiple constraints coupled with the small land sizes including high unemployment, social tension, migration and crowding out the nearest towns. Further, findings pointed out that rural market failures—particularly in the areas of land and finance—force poorer subpopulations to choose strategies with demonstrably lower returns, while wealthier ones are engaging in higher returns with lower marginal and entry costs of participation. Hence, push-and-pull factors of off-farm and non-farm engagements are the survival strategies and persuade the social welfare of the poor. Conclusion: With heterogenous constraints, diversification patterns reflect people's voluntary asset exchanges and asset allocation across diverse activities to attain the best possible balance of projected returns and risk exposure given the restrictions they confront due to missing or incomplete markets for land, credit, or labor. Particular emphasis for the vibrant income diversification strategies should be set in and policymakers must stimulate buoyant rural economies, with robust non-farm and off-farm income and innovative farming practices. Hence, the poor must gain access to the growing market niches and basic infrastructure development. Smooth and unconstrained labor markets provide one important bridge linking the rural poor to growing non-farm opportunities. © 2021, The Author(s).