What is the current land policy in Ethiopia?

The problem of Land reform in Ethiopia has hampered that country's economic development through out the late 19th and 20th centuries. 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. Ethiopia still faces issues of sustainable food self-sufficiency despite repeated efforts at land reform.

The land policy can basically be grouped into two and for the sake of clarity and of easy distinction, they are labeled here as the ‘confinement’ versus ‘paternalistic’ views / propositions. As the current land policy in Ethiopia demands permanent residence in a farming community to be eligible for a use right over a piece of land, the ‘confinement’ view accuses the policy of having shackled farmers and forced them to permanently stay in rural areas. A typical argument that could characterize this claim looks like the following.

€œThe land system has discouraged peasant mobility and trapped the population in the rural areas…. Improvements in livelihoods are impossible unless a considerable portion of this population is released from the land and moves out of the rural areas. €¦ The greater mobility of peasants out of agriculture will stimulate the greater mobility of land.

Land will be able to move “freelyâ€? From those who cannot use it efficiently to those who can. €¦The destination of a mobile peasantry will be the urban areas.

€? (Rahmato, 1999). In effect, it is said that the policy has condemned farmers to a life of subsistence production, compelling them to eke out a living from the so-called ‘starvation plots’, which are reportedly the direct consequences of the land policy that has also invariably been threatening farmers existing holdings and worsening their sense of insecurity.

On the other hand, the government thinks differently and claims that if the current policy were changed in favor of private ownership, farmers would be forced to resort to what is called distress sales and inundate the urban centers only to face the attendant social ills that are characteristic of such moves. In other words, it insists that the current policy regime is in place precisely because of the need to protect farmers from a possible loss of their prized and perhaps irretrievable asset which would occur if and when policies like full land ownership rights (including the right to transfer it through sales) were conferred. This is what can be called the ‘paternalistic’ proposition.

Looking at these propositions, one would wonder if the land policy is a conscious link between urban rural interactions and is serving as a tool to regulate urban explosion, which is certainly a big problem in the developing world. This has made inquiring into the alleged role of the land policy interesting not only to determine the impact of the policy on people’s movement, but also to get a clearer view of the intent and act of the government and to understand the linkage between land policy and rural urban transformation.

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