Value chains & market institutions

Wheat is one of ten priority commodities of the Ten-year Agricultural Development Plan¹. The Ministry of Agriculture reports that dry-season irrigated wheat expanded from 20,000 hectares in 2020 to 3.5 million hectares in 2025 and its production from 0.6 million to 128 million quintals, and that rainy-season wheat expanded from 1.8 million to 4.2 million hectares, with production rising from 53 million to 152 million quintals¹. For 2025 the Ministry gives a total of 7.8 million hectares and 280 million quintals, equal to 28.0 million tonnes (own conversion)¹. These are Ministry statements. FAO's food balance sheet, which rests on FAO estimates, shows wheat production of 5.8 million tonnes and a wheat self-sufficiency ratio of 75.0% in 2023 (own calculation)².

The Ministry states that in 2025 domestic wheat fully replaced an estimated 2.6 million quintals of wheat imported in 2021, and that wheat imports had cost up to US$1 billion a year¹. FAOSTAT records wheat grain imports of 1.84 million tonnes in 2021, 567 thousand tonnes in 2023 and 15 thousand tonnes in 2024, the last value supplied by an external organisation³. The FAOSTAT 2021 figure equals 18.4 million quintals (own conversion), against the 2.6 million quintals the Ministry cites for that year. Customs data published by the National Bank of Ethiopia show imports of 1.59 million tonnes of grain of all cereals in 2024/25, after 3.64 million tonnes in 2020/21⁴.

According to a Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture attaché report of April 2025, Ethiopia had no domestic primary production of inorganic fertilisers and the state-owned Ethiopian Agricultural Businesses Corporation (EABC) carried out about 90% of imports and distributed them to farmers through cooperatives⁵. Customs recorded fertiliser imports of 2.26 million tonnes in 2023/24 and 1.34 million tonnes in 2024/25, and the import bill fell by 20.4% to US$1,047.4 million in 2024/25⁴. On FAOSTAT data urea and other NP compounds accounted for 1.73 of the 1.75 million tonnes imported in 2023 (own sum)⁶.

The Ministry of Agriculture stated that more than 20 million quintals of fertiliser, 2.0 million tonnes (own conversion), were distributed to farmers in 2025/26⁷. The IMF reported that the 2025/26 budget capped fertiliser subsidies at ETB 84 billion, about US$621 million converted at the end-June 2025 rate because no 2025/26 average rate was published (own calculation) and 0.4% of GDP, and that the National Bank of Ethiopia sold about US$1 billion of foreign exchange to the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia between July and October 2025 to settle fertiliser imports⁸⁹. No published outturn of subsidy spending was found.

The federal budget proclamation for EFY 2019 (2026/27) appropriates ETB 91.4 billion to agriculture and rural development, about US$566 million at the mid-point of the National Bank of Ethiopia's indicative buying and selling rates on 31 August 2026 (own calculation) and 3.91% of the federal budget of ETB 2,339.3 billion¹¹¹². The allocation was ETB 23.0 billion in EFY 2017 (2024/25) and ETB 64.5 billion in EFY 2018 (2025/26)¹³¹⁴. Capital spending accounts for ETB 84.9 billion of the EFY 2019 amount, and the food security sub-programme of the Ministry of Agriculture, which carries the Productive Safety Net projects, accounts for ETB 56.0 billion, of which ETB 45.0 billion comes from the treasury¹¹. The EFY 2018 Citizens' Budget also lists ETB 17.1 billion for irrigation projects¹⁵. These are appropriations at the federal level, and the subsidy to regional governments is not broken down by sector.

The rural Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), launched in 2005 and led by the Ministry of Agriculture, covered about 8 million beneficiaries in 2.5 million households in half of the country's woredas in 2025, and the urban safety net reached 1.7 million people in 88 cities²⁴. From 2007 to 2025 the programme covered between 5.2 million (2015) and 7.9 million (2016–2022) people a year, and the number of woredas rose from 192 in 2005 to 492 in 2025²⁴. In 2024 the government raised its budget contribution to rural and urban safety nets from about ETB 7.9 billion to ETB 60 billion a year, approximately US$450 million on the World Bank's conversion²⁴. The World Bank approved a US$200 million credit for the sixth phase on 3 March 2026, which targets 8 million people in 13 regions²⁵²⁴.

About 1.1 million people received humanitarian food assistance in May 2026, according to the Joint Emergency Operation Program and the Ethiopian Disaster Risk Management Commission, and assistance resumed in Tigray in July 2026, targeting over 1.1 million people²⁶²⁷. FEWS NET expected a below-average meher harvest in 2026, with production losses estimated at more than 40% in East and West Hararghe²⁷. WFP planned to reach 4.5 million people in 2026²⁸. No official national estimate of people in need of food assistance for 2026 was found.

The Federal Cooperative Agency counted more than 92,755 cooperatives with 21.0 million members in 2021, including 21,328 savings and credit cooperatives with 5.4 million members, and 131 cooperative unions³². The Ethiopian Cooperatives Commission was allocated a federal recurrent budget of ETB 216.5 million for EFY 2019 (2026/27)¹¹. On 17 June 2026 a parliamentary committee held a public hearing on a draft proclamation on Farmers' Agribusiness Companies, which the Minister of Agriculture described as a complement to existing institutions³³.

The Agricultural Transformation Institute reports that its Agricultural Commercialization Clusters reached over 4.4 million farmers in 2019–2025, more than 2.5 million of them organised in Farmers' Production Clusters, and that the marketable surplus of grains in cluster areas rose from 28% in 2019 to 58% in 2024²⁹. The second phase is to operate in nine regions²⁹.

The Coffee Marketing and Quality Control Proclamation No. 1051/2017 was published in the Federal Negarit Gazette (gazette issue dated 5 June 2017, signature line dated July 2017, day blank) and entered into force on publication³⁴. Article 8(2) allows a coffee producer to export directly from his own farm after grading, and Article 8(3) requires coffee traded on the domestic market through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange or other alternative transaction centres to be graded³⁴. Under Article 4 the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority inspects export coffee, sends sealed and certified coffee to the port and decides on complaints about quality grading³⁴. Traded volumes and values of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange are not shown because its website could not be reached in October 2026.