The Ethiopian government signed a 360 million yen ($2.3 million) grant agreement with the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, on Sept. 30 to accelerate the modernisation of the country’s rice industry through agricultural machinery and equipment.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the grant will finance combine harvesters, tractors, rice-processing machinery and land-preparation equipment. The government expects the equipment to increase rice output, improve processing efficiency and reduce post-harvest losses.
Mechanisation remains underdeveloped
The Japanese support comes as limited mechanisation continues to rank among the main constraints on Ethiopia’s rice industry.
A 2019 study across several production areas found that only 2% of farms used tractors for land preparation, while 22.7% had access to rice-polishing equipment. The Ministry of Agriculture later incorporated those findings into its National Rice Flagship Program 2023-2027, which identified limited access to machinery as a major constraint on the sector’s development.
The same study found that weeding accounted for about 66% of the labour used in rice production. The national programme therefore identifies land preparation, weeding, harvesting, threshing and processing as operations where greater use of mechanical power could improve productivity.
The Japanese grant targets several of those priority areas. The support also comes as Addis Ababa pursues ambitious growth targets for the rice industry.
Production rises but remains far below target
Ethiopia has sharply increased rice production over the past decade. Ministry of Agriculture data show that paddy rice output nearly tripled to 276,000 tonnes in 2021 from 97,000 tonnes in 2012.
Over the same period, farmers expanded the area planted with rice to 88,000 hectares from 34,000 hectares.
Under the second National Rice Development Strategy, or NRDS-II, which covers 2019-2030, Addis Ababa aims to raise paddy rice production to 1.93 million tonnes by 2030 and achieve self-sufficiency.
However, mechanisation represents only one part of that effort. Authorities also identify weak irrigation capacity, limited access to credit, shortages of skilled personnel, land fragmentation and insufficient access to suitable equipment as structural constraints on the industry.
© Copyright 2025 The SSResource Media.
All rights reserved.