Roads to Commercialisation? Rural Infrastructure and Crop Portfolio Composition Among Ethiopian Smallholders

Between 2011 and 2016, Ethiopia built more than 62,000 kilometres of rural roads under the Universal Rural Road Access Program. Did it change what farmers grew? We track 2,367 rural households across two waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (2013/14 and 2015/16) and estimate the within-household change in cash crop plot share using a first-difference specification. Road distance has no statistically significant effect on crop portfolio composition over this period (β = −0.0002, p = 0.953). What predicts commercialisation is household wealth: each step up the welfare distribution is associated with a 0.75 percentage point larger increase in cash crop share (β = 0.0075, p = 0.001), and the richest quintile increased its cash crop share at five times the rate of the poorest. The pattern holds after controlling for elevation, rainfall, and market distance. We interpret the null result as evidence that road access reduces transport costs without addressing the risk, capital, and knowledge constraints that keep poor households anchored in subsistence production. Agricultural transformation in rural Ethiopia is less a transportation problem than it is a financial one.