Since 1980, Ethiopia has been struggling to feed its growing population, despite the fact that agriculture is the mainstay of its economy. A number of government initiatives aimed at raising food production and ensuring national food security have made little progress in achieving their objectives. This paper identifies some of the implications of the new agricultural intensification programme, focusing on the technical efficiency and productivity of maize growers in the Harari region of Ethiopia for food insecurity and agricultural development policies. The paper concludes that there is scope to improve the technical efficiency of maize farmers and enhance their socioeconomic situation in the Harari region.

In 1994/95 Ethiopia launched a new agricultural intensification program based on the experience gained from the programs of the past and the success of the SG 2000 agricultural project in achieving higher yields in the subsistence sector. Stochastic frontier production functions were estimated for a sample of maize farmers within and outside the New Extension Program in order to study their technical inefficiencies and identify some of the factors contributing to variations in the productivity of maize farmers in the Harari Region of Ethiopia. It is found that there were technical change and changes in technical inefficiencies of maize farmers between 1994/95 and 1997/98. The average technical efficiency of maize farmers was 73 per cent and factors such as agricultural extension, formal education, and off-farm incomes were important factors affecting the technical inefficiencies of maize farmers within the program. We concluded that policies enhancing the managerial and decision-making capacity of maize growers contributed towards increasing their technical efficiencies and the objective of achieving increased maize production.