Spices production and marketing in Ethiopia: A review

Abstract

This paper attempts to describe the status, challenges and opportunities of spices production and marketing in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has enormous potential to produce and export various spice crops. The country mainly produces and exports; chillies, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, cumin, fenugreek, coriander and so forth. Inspite of the fact that the country has tremendous potential for various spices production, the subsector of spices had remained untapped and neglected and subsequently the level of production and share of spice crops of the total export earning of the country is at considerably low level. Hence, it is essential to describe the status, challenges and opportunities of spices sector in Ethiopia, for best uses of the potential and untapped spice crop resources. Among the various spices crops, chilli/hot pepper is the most commonly produced spices in Ethiopia. However, the production of ginger has devastated in 2013 on wards due to bacterial wilt epidemic and hence, turmeric occupies the large share of its production and exports. Similarly, the Ethiopian spice exports has showed a declining trend from 2013 on wards. This is mainly due to the disease that considerably affect ginger production and the rapid increasing domestic demand of spices. Hence, the share of spices export has been remained low compared to the country’s total export earnings. Therefore, intervention and provide awareness for spices growers on using improved production and processing technology, training across all value chains, formulating strong marketing regulations and proclamation is of paramount importance to increase the production, profits and export values.