Land reform in Ethiopia
Attempts to modernize land ownership by giving title either to the peasants who till the soil, or to large-scale farming programs, have been tried under imperial rulers like Emperor Haile Selassie, and under Marxist regimes like the Derg, with mixed results.
The existence of so many land tenure systems, coupled with the lack of reliable data, has made it difficult to give a comprehensive assessment of landownership in Ethiopia.
[2] The other major form of tenure was gult, an ownership right acquired from the monarch or from provincial rulers who were empowered to make land grants.
[2] Maderia tenure became a far more common following the Second World War, as Emperor Haile Selassie used it to reward the arbegnoch (or "Patriots") who had fought the Italian occupiers.
[2] In the lowland periphery and the Great Rift Valley, the traditional practice of transhumance and the allocation of pastoral land according to tribal custom remained undisturbed until after World War II.
The pastoral social structure is based on a kinship system with strong interclan connections; grazing and water rights are regulated by custom.
Until the 1950s, this pastoral life remained largely undisturbed by the highlanders, who intensely disliked the hot and humid lowland climate and feared malaria.
The government's desire to promote such agriculture, combined with its policy of creating new tax revenues, put pressure on many pastoralists, especially the Afar and the Somali.
One example was the 1968 Gojjam revolt, where the peasants successfully resisted government efforts to survey their lands, believing that it would increase the taxes levied by local corrupt officials.
By 1974 it was clear that the archaic land tenure system was one of the major factors responsible for the backward condition of Ethiopia's agriculture and the onset of the revolution.
However, in the Afar area of the lower Awash Valley, where large-scale commercial estates had thrived, there was opposition to land reform, led mainly by tribal leaders (and large landowners), such as Alimirah Hanfadhe the Sultan of Aussa.
The process meant not only smaller farms but also the fragmentation of holdings, which were often scattered into small plots to give families land of comparable quality.
[2] In 1984 the founding congress of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia emphasized the need for a coordinated strategy based on socialist principles to accelerate agricultural development.
To implement this strategy, the government relied on peasant associations and rural development, cooperatives and state farms, resettlement and villagization, increased food production, and a new marketing policy.
[2] Articles 8 and 10 of the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation required that peasants be organized into a hierarchy of associations that would facilitate the implementation of rural development programs and policies.
Peasant associations also became involved in organizing forestry programs, local service and production cooperatives, road construction, and data collection projects, such as the 1984 census.
The first stage was the melba, an elementary type of cooperative that required members to pool land (with the exception of plots of up to 2,000 square meters, which could be set aside for private use) and to share oxen and farm implements.
The third stage, the weland, abolished private land use and established advanced forms of cooperatives, whose goal was to use mechanized farming with members organized into production brigades.
[2] The government provided a number of inducements to producers' cooperatives, including priority for credits, fertilizers, improved seed, and access to consumer items and building materials.
After the 1975 land reform, peasants began withholding grain from the market to drive up prices because government price-control measures had created shortages of consumer items such as coffee, cooking oil, salt, and sugar.
Additionally, increased peasant consumption caused shortages of food items such as teff, wheat, corn, and other grains in urban areas.
The problem became so serious that Mengistu Haile Mariam, the chairman of the Derg, lashed out against the peasantry on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of military rule in September 1978, criticizing them for their capitalist mentality and their petit bourgeois tendencies.
Mengistu and his advisers believed that state farms would produce grain for urban areas and raw materials for domestic industry and would also increase production of cash crops such as coffee to generate badly needed foreign exchange.
Western donors and governments expressed fears that the resettlement plans would strain the country's finances, would depopulate areas of resistance, would weaken the guerrillas' support base and deny them access to recruits, would violate human rights through lack of medical attention.
The objectives of the program, which grouped scattered farming communities throughout the country into small village clusters, were to promote rational land use; conserve resources; provide access to clean water and to health and education services; and strengthen security.
Although the government had villagized about 13 million people by 1989, international criticism, deteriorating security conditions, and lack of resources doomed the plan to failure.
In early 1990, the government essentially abandoned villagization when it announced new economic policies that called for free-market reforms and a relaxation of centralized planning.
