Cereals availability study in Ethiopia, 2008 : development of a spatial equilibrium modelling approach to study the impact of policy intervention on cereals availability

Unusual changes in grain markets have been the source of major concerns for the Government of Ethiopia and its development partners. Increase in cereal price presented serious challenges to the implementation of country's food security programs. Local procurement of food by the WFP declined also in the recent years. Being one of the largest donors of local procurement of food, the European Union was particularly concerned about these developments. Thus, as a General Directorate in charge of supporting EU policies, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EU developed the technical specification of a project to extend the scope of the usual Cereal Availability Study (CAS) in order to account for the developments in the Ethiopian cereal markets. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) consortium with the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) was selected to carry out the study. A number of preliminary analyses, undertaken by the World Bank and IFPRI had put forward a number of hypotheses to explain unusual high cereal prices. While the different hypotheses were widely debated in the country, there is limited primary information to validate or refute them. It is in this context that the current study was undertaken. The focus has been mainly on achieving the three following objectives: (1) To gather information regarding recent changes in cereal production, storage, and marketing patterns in order to test the hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the high price of cereals in Ethiopian markets. (2) To improve the general methodology of the past cereal availability studies. (3) To estimate the quantity of maize, sorghum, and wheat that can be procured from domestic markets in the 2008 for relief purposes without disturbing the local market.