A National Data Hub Offers Guidance for Ethiopia’s Struggling Agriculture

Across Ethiopia’s sweeping farmlands, from the green plateaus of Oromia to the undulating highlands of Amhara and the mist-wrapped slopes of the south, an invisible crisis is quietly eroding the nation’s agricultural backbone.

The soil itself is turning against the farmers.

Once-rich earth that fed generations is becoming sour and barren. The culprit is soil acidity, a slow and silent process that threatens to unravel decades of agricultural progress.

After years of heavy rainfall, nutrient loss, and the unchecked use of acid-forming fertilizers, millions of hectares are losing fertility. Experts now warn that roughly 43% of Ethiopia’s arable land, around 7 million hectares, is affected, weakening yields and deepening the country’s food insecurity.

In scientific terms, acidic soil means low pH and high concentrations of aluminum ions that block plants from absorbing nutrients such as phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium. In human terms, it means smaller harvests, exhausted land, and farmers struggling to make ends meet.

For years, policymakers have known about soil acidity but have lacked precise, up-to-date data to act effectively. Ethiopia’s agro-ecological zones are diverse and vast, but the information needed to guide local interventions has often been fragmented or outdated.

Two weeks ago, a seminal project closed that may help bridge the information gap.

At the closing event in Addis Ababa, officials and researchers unveiled a 6.9-million-dollar initiative aimed at closing Ethiopia’s data gap in soil, land, and crop management. The project, funded through the European Union’s Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA) program, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), established the Land Soil Crop (LSC) Hub.

The hub, part of a five-year regional effort implemented in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda, aggregates land, soil and crop data points covering several agro-ecological metrics . It aims to make agricultural and environmental information accessible to farmers, policymakers, and scientists in real time, helping them make decisions rooted in evidence rather than guesswork.

“This is about improving agricultural decisions to realize better land,crop and soil management,” said Rick Van den Bosch, ISRIC’s director. “National decisions on fertilizer subsidies, for instance, could now be informed by data on efficiency and soil suitability. We need to follow up with proper activities to implement this across all African nations.”

In Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) will manage the hub. The chairman of the EIAR Board of Directors, Abera Deresa (PhD), says that while data collection has improved over the decades, it remains far from meeting national needs.

“There remains a serious mismatch between data demand and actual supply,” Abera told Shega. “That is one of the reasons we have a food deficit.”

The gaps, he said, are especially visible in areas like soil acidity and fertilizer use. Much of Ethiopia’s fertilizer, urea, and DAP, is imported, and both are applied inconsistently or inefficiently by smallholder farmers. “We neither import adequate fertilizer nor do farmers efficiently apply it,” Abera said.

On average, Ethiopian farmers use about 35 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, far below global or regional standards. Abera argues that while the government has the institutional capacity to improve agricultural productivity, it faces formidable obstacles, including foreign currency shortages, input supply delays, and global price shocks.

“We need alternatives,” he added. “Producing fertilizer domestically, promoting compost, and integrating organic methods are some of the ways forward.”

For Abera and fellow experts at the EIAR, tackling soil degradation and low productivity begins with reliable information. Without it, even well-intentioned interventions like distributing lime or subsidizing fertilizer risk being inefficient or misplaced.

For decades, agricultural data in Ethiopia has been collected by different institutions, ministries, research centers, and universities, often with little coordination. The LSC hub is designed to bridge those silos. Using standardized metadata and APIs, the platform allows information from different sources to be shared, compared, and updated seamlessly.

By integrating environmental, crop, and soil data, its developers hope to strengthen climate-smart agriculture, a practice that emphasizes sustainability and resilience in a changing climate.

“This is not just a technological tool, it’s a foundation for agricultural transformation,” Abera said.

The initiative arrives as Ethiopia faces mounting pressure to secure food production amid worsening environmental stress. The country’s ten-year agricultural strategy (2021–2030) focuses on achieving food self-sufficiency by expanding irrigation, modernizing farming, and promoting high-value crops. Yet these efforts are being undermined by land degradation, rising input costs, and climate shocks.

Among these, soil acidity stands out as one of the most urgent threats. Studies show that untreated acidic soil can reduce productivity by up to 100 percent, rendering entire plots unusable.

Girma Mamo (PhD), senior researcher at EIAR, says the problem is spreading fastest in areas with heavy rainfall. “We have observed higher soil acidity in regions that receive more rain,” he said. “The LSC hub allows us to plan lime application and fertilizer use based on accurate data.”

Lime, which neutralizes acidic soils, has become central to Ethiopia’s response. The government has been purchasing and distributing it across regions, but scaling production and logistics has been difficult. Recently, authorities secured 20 million dollars to build lime-crushing plants in high-acidity zones.

Still, Girma emphasizes that such interventions will only work if supported by sustained research and data sharing. “Reliable data is the foundation of any serious agricultural recovery effort,” he said. “We need resources to scale these systems across nearly 1,100 woredas in the country.”

Behind the data and policy discussions lie millions of smallholder farmers who depend on fragile soils. Many have watched their yields shrink over the years despite using more fertilizer and investing more labor.

In parts of Oromia and western Amhara, fields that once produced abundant maize and teff now yield half their former output. The effects ripple outward, reducing household income, driving food inflation, and deepening rural poverty.

Agricultural experts say that building resilience will require combining new technology with local knowledge. Community-based soil mapping, farmer education, and decentralized lime production are among the strategies being tested.

“There is no one solution,” Abera said. “But better data makes every other solution stronger.”

The LSC hub may not reverse soil acidity overnight, but it signals a growing recognition that the battle for Ethiopia’s food security is as much about information as it is about rainfall or fertilizer.