Conference Agenda

We examine the impact of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Commercialization Clusters (ACC) program on farm input investment, production outcomes, market access, food consumption, and land-use change. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in the rollout of ACC and applying a doubly robust difference-in-differences estimator, complemented by event-study analyses and high-resolution remote-sensing data, we assess both household-level and landscape-level responses to the program. We find that ACC leads to large and significant increases in agricultural input investment, including fertilizers, seeds, and improved seeds, alongside substantial gains in total agricultural output. Despite observable production gains, we find more limited evidence of short-run increases in market sales, implying that commercialization effects may not materialize immediately. Instead, households appear to absorb a substantial share of the additional output through increased own-consumption, reducing reliance on food purchases while maintaining overall food security. At the same time, ACC induces significant land-use change. Treated areas experience marked cropland expansion accompanied by forest loss, with effects persisting over time. We do not find corresponding improvements in remotely sensed indicators of vegetation productivity, implying that output growth is achieved primarily through input intensification and extensive-margin expansion rather than gains in per-hectare productivity observable from space. Our findings imply that large-scale commercialization initiatives can effectively stimulate investment and production at scale but may also generate unintended environmental trade-offs in the absence of complementary land-use governance and sustainable intensification measures.