Land Reform in Ethiopia, 1974-1977

Extract

In March 1975, the Ethiopian ruling military council, or Derg, proclaimed a sweeping land reform, which aimed at bringing about a complete transformation in the country's complex land tenure system and in its social and political structures. More than a land reform, the measure should be called a land revolution, for there was nothing reformist in the Derg's approach. It simply opened the floodgates of rural discontent, allowing the peasants to take over the land and encouraging them to organize into “peasant associations.” The government did not seriously attempt to control the process, partly for ideological reasons, and partly because it simply could not do it. Rather, the peasant associations were allowed to decide whether to redistribute land among their members, or to enter into collective forms of land cultivation.

The ambitious scope of the reform, and the suddenness with which it was announced and implemented, led most observers, including many radical Ethiopians and most diplomats from socialist countries, to forecast economic disaster and social breakdown. Such dark predictions did not come true. The economic consequences of the land reform were some increase in production, due mostly to good weather conditions (Dalton, 1975), and a tangible improvement in the peasants' living conditions. The urban population, though, suffered because of the sharp price increases that resulted from the disruption of the marketing system and an increase in on-farm consumption (Holmberg, 1976). Social turmoil undoubtedly was part of the land reform process, and thousands of people lost their lives in it.