This working paper analyzes four case studies of local districts in Ethiopia to support the theory that sustainable land management would be benefited by linking natural resource management with market-oriented commodity development.

Land degradation has been identified as severe environmental problem in Ethiopia, especially since the early 1970s. This paper focuses mainly on the effect of short-term benefits to farmers and the explicit considerations of the linkages between natural resource management and market-oriented commodity development on the adoption and scaling out of sustainable land management practices.

It hypothesizes that linking natural resource management with market-oriented commodity development enhances sustainable land management by providing farmers with short-term benefits. This hypothesis is tested with analysis of case studies of four districts in Ethiopia. Two of the case studies deal with the linkage between grazing land development and market-oriented livestock development, and the other two deal with the linkage between conservation agriculture and market-oriented crop production.