Reduction formulae for the effective, or macroscopic, Ohm’s law parameters are derived for inhomogeneous plasmas with anisotropic conductivity fluctuations having two general types of geometry: (a) elongated or shortened in the direction of the magnetic field and (b) two‐dimensional, with the direction of constant properties lying in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field. In each case, two approaches are used: (a) a small perturbation method and (b) an approximate method where each region in the plasma is considered separately, and consistency conditions are used to relate the results corresponding to each separate region to the effective properties of the whole plasma. Both methods are found to agree well when the fluctuations are weak, but differences appear at high fluctuation levels and, for nonuniformities very elongated along B&drarr;, when the Hall parameter &bgr; is high. Comparison with available exact solutions valid at high &bgr; and strong fluctuation levels indicates that the self‐consistency method gives accurate results even in these cases. The results of these analyses are used to evaluate the performance reduction in magnetohydrodynamic channels with plasma nonuniformities of several geometries, including axial streamers, perfectly isotropic fluctuations, and fluctuations elongated along B&drarr;; the power density is reduced most strongly when &bgr; and the rms of the fluctuations are high, and also when the inhomogeneities are stretched along the magnetic field.