Gutu Tesso, Bezabih Emana and Mengistu Ketema
The paper presents empirical findings on the efforts made by smallholder farmers to maintain livelihood needs through efficient allocation of resources under changing climate and dwindling natural resources base. The data used was generated through a survey of 452 households in North Shewa Zone. The income required to meet minimum livelihood needs for food, education, health, clothing and other social obligations was determined and used as an objective to be attained. This income was computed from the diverse livelihood of Households (HHs). Current and future scenarios were built based on the predicted values of climate variables, farm size and technology for years 2012, 2022 and 2032. A Linear Programming (LP) model was built in GAMS software so as to determine optimal combination of agricultural enterprises that would generate the minimum net income required under each scenario to sustain lives and livelihoods. The result shows that farmers display inefficient use of available resources and they can increase their net income even beyond the minimum requirement by selecting optimal number of enterprises that suits the existing and predicted climate. In the future, however, farmers should be encouraged to take up certain critical adaptation strategies, which would enable them to bear the negative consequences of climate change (CC) impacts.
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