A major new Africa-wide study has issued a stark warning: Ethiopia must accelerate its adoption of technology, research investment, and digital tools to unlock the full potential of its agricultural sector and tackle persistent rural poverty. The 2025 Annual Trends and Outlook Report (ATOR 2025), released by AKADEMIYA2063 under the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), reveals that most of Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth, including Ethiopia’s, still relies on expanding cultivated areas rather than innovation and efficiency gains.
The report highlights a critical disparity: while countries in Asia leveraged improved seeds, irrigation, mechanisation, and research to raise yields and cut poverty, African productivity remains stagnant once land expansion is stripped out. African governments, Ethiopia included, still allocate well below the CAADP target of 10 percent of national budgets to agriculture, and even less to long-term research and development. Public agricultural research spending across Sub-Saharan Africa averages just over US$2 billion a year, a figure dwarfed by regions that successfully used science to drive a Green Revolution.
Authors of the report argue that this underinvestment directly limits total factor productivity (TFP) – the efficiency with which land, labour, and capital are used – and slows structural transformation. Micro-level studies cited in the report indicate that, for many smallholders, productivity growth has been flat or even negative, contributing to only modest reductions in extreme poverty and hunger since 1990.
ATOR 2025 stresses that Africa’s challenge is no longer a lack of technology but the failure to adopt and scale it. The report identifies digital agriculture, artificial intelligence, geospatial tools, improved seeds, biotechnology, mechanisation, modern irrigation, insect farming, and aquaponics as proven or emerging solutions. These technologies could raise yields, cut losses, and build resilience if properly deployed. A new “Untapped Potential Index” reveals that many countries, including Ethiopia, have high needs and growing readiness for AI and geospatial tools in agriculture but very low actual use, pointing to a significant gap between opportunity and reality.
Digital advisory platforms, for example, have been shown to boost yields and incomes when tailored to local conditions and embedded in trusted relationships. However, weak infrastructure, low digital literacy, and limited finance are holding back scale. The report repeatedly notes that technology alone will not transform Ethiopia’s agrifood system without stronger institutions, coherent policies, and lower transaction costs. It calls these “the real technology frontier” – arguing that improved seeds, fertilisers, and digital tools only deliver impact when backed by predictable regulation, effective extension systems, producer organisations, and functioning markets.
Seed policy and regulatory frameworks are singled out as a core challenge in many African countries, where slow variety release, weak quality control, and fragmented markets limit farmers’ access to climate-resilient, locally adapted seeds. ATOR 2025 urges more harmonised, science-based rules at the regional level and better integration of informal and farmer-managed seed systems, which remain vital for smallholders.
Producer organisations and cooperatives are highlighted as critical intermediaries for complex technologies, from AI-driven advisory to digital finance. By aggregating demand, brokering partnerships with service providers, and building trust, they can help smallholders adopt innovations more quickly and fairly. The study also underlines the importance of data and monitoring for policy decisions, noting that CAADP’s Biennial Review has improved accountability but still suffers from gaps and delays in national statistics. It calls for stronger use of digital tools, geospatial data, and real-time information systems to track yields, climate risks, market flows, and investment impacts.
For Ethiopia, which is already rolling out digital farmer registries and advisory hotlines, the report suggests that scaling such systems – and ensuring they feed into planning and budgeting – will be central to building a more evidence-based agricultural strategy. Comparative chapters on China and Latin America show how long-term investment in research, extension, rural infrastructure, and innovation systems allowed those regions to shift from land expansion to productivity-led growth. They also demonstrate how targeted use of digital tools, intelligent input management, and value-chain integration improved efficiency and competitiveness.
The report argues that Ethiopia and its neighbours can draw on these experiences while tailoring solutions to local conditions, especially by prioritising agricultural R&D and technology adaptation, building digital and climate-intelligence infrastructure, empowering producer organisations and SMEs as innovation partners, and aligning public spending with high-return interventions rather than short-term input subsidies.
Overall, ATOR 2025 frames the next decade as a decisive window for Africa’s agrifood transformation under the newly adopted Kampala Declaration and CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035. It urges governments, including Ethiopia’s, to treat science, technology, and innovation as “str