Opportunities, Constraints and Transforming Sustainable Poultry Production in Ethiopia: A Review (2010–2025)

Abstract

The poultry sector holds significant potential to contribute to income generation, food security, and employment opportunities; particularly, it is the most significant livestock sub-sector for Ethiopia's rural populations. However, despite these potentials, the sector faces several challenges; diseases, shortage of feed, and predators are the major ones. Sustainable poultry production is increasingly positioned as a pragmatic pathway for improving food and nutrition security, generating rural and peri-urban livelihoods, and supplying rapidly expanding domestic markets, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Ethiopia exemplifies this dual opportunity: the country hosts a large smallholder chicken population embedded in diverse agro-ecologies while simultaneously experiencing an emerging commercial sector responding to urban demand. Yet the sustainability performance of Ethiopian poultry value chains remains constrained by interacting bottlenecks that span feed quantity and quality, animal health and biosecurity, antimicrobial stewardship, hatchery and genetics services, market coordination, infrastructure, financing, and climate-related risks. This review synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence from January 1, 2010 and September 30, 2025 to map Ethiopia’s poultry production landscape, identify context-specific sustainability opportunities, and propose transformation pathways that balance productivity growth with environmental integrity, public health safeguards, and inclusive development. Evidence indicates that improving sustainability in Ethiopia requires system redesign rather than isolated technical fixes. Promising directions include diversifying and quality-assuring locally available feed resources while addressing mycotoxin risks; strengthening vaccination access, surveillance, and biosecurity to reduce endemic disease pressure; integrating One Health principles to manage food-borne hazards and antimicrobial resistance; using structured sustainability assessment tools (including life cycle and multi-criteria approaches) to guide investments; and leveraging Ethiopia’s indigenous chicken diversity to design breeding programs aligned with farmer preferences and climatic resilience. The review concludes that targeted institutional innovations—coordinated input delivery, reliable extension and diagnostics, enforceable quality standards, and investment in cold chains and slaughter logistics—are pivotal for converting opportunities into measurable sustainability gains across smallholder and commercial systems.