The pastoral peace and seeming plenty of the Ethiopian highlands, with their endless patchwork of homesteads encircled by fields of teff and wheat, flatter to deceive.
Dig beneath the picturesque surface, says economist Berhanu Nega, and you will find ”a Malthusian disaster waiting to happen”.
More than 80% of Ethiopia’s 63-million people live on rural land that, under the pressure of climate change, cannot produce enough staple foods. In just two decades, the country’s rural multitudes will have swollen to 88-million.
”It’s frightening to fly over farming areas,” says Nega, a member of the Ethiopian Economic Association, a lobby group of local economists. ”People are trying to farm everywhere, even on mountain tops. The only place you can see trees is around churches.”
Ethiopian agriculture is entirely rain-fed. Fuelled by rampant deforestation, droughts that once occurred every 20 years are now striking every three.
The latest, which threatens to reduce the cereal crop by up to 20%, has led Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to warn that 15-million people face famine. Aid agencies say this year’s food crisis is potentially worse than that of 1985, which killed nearly a million people, drew world attention and spurred the launch of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid.
Stressing that the number of Ethio-pians in need never falls below five million, Nega points to cultural factors underpinning the weakness of the farming sector. ”Nothing has changed since Ethiopia pioneered settled agriculture 3 000 years ago,” he says. ”It’s still a case of two oxen and a plough.”
But he insists that structural constraints leave peasant farmers less able to cope with climate change, and play a large role in persuading them to produce for subsistence only.
Chief among them is state ownership of all land, a hangover from Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist dictatorship, now written into the Constitution by the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front.
The present ruling party paid lip service to the need to free up markets and mobilise private investment. But as a party of ”petty bourgeois” intellectuals, it remained deeply suspicious of business and wary of too much market-friendly reform.
One of its concerns, Nega says, is that a market in agricultural land will drive the weak to the wall and force a tidal wave of migrants to the towns.
Not all the peasants agree, according to a survey by the association’s policy research unit, which Nega heads. Recently presented to the government in an effort to spur dialogue, it finds that 47% favour public ownership, 32% oppose it and 15% are undecided.
”Our reading is that there is no unanimity among farmers. If there was open debate I believe the farming community would be evenly split on the issue,” Nega remarks. This contradicts Zenawi’s televised claim that not a single peasant favoured privatisation.
Surprisingly, 96% of farmers said they would not sell their land if they could, suggesting that government fears of untrammelled urbanisation were groundless.
Tenure security is an overriding concern of all farmers, with close to 76% fearing they will not be able to keep their land for five years. Nega observes that the existing tenure system is open to periodic bouts of land redistribution — 11% of Ethiopians are landless — often for purposes of political patronage.
This, together with the ban on the sale and leasing of land, served to hamper the emergence of an improving farmer class.
The survey throws into harsh relief conditions on the land. It finds that the average plot size is just over one hectare a household of six, and that in terms of farming income 63% of farmers fall below the poverty line of about R1 000 (1059 birr) a household a year.
The government’s response has been to advocate modern agricultural technology, which makes little sense given the plot sizes, Nega says. ”Technology without institutional change will not solve our problems.”
Nega’s unit does not call for wall-to-wall freehold title in Ethiopia. Policy has to take account of regional and cultural differences — freehold is a meaningless concept to the country’s nomadic pastoralists, for example.
The unit also argues that agrarian policy cannot be divorced from the need for industrial growth. The national product is grossly skewed towards agriculture, with industry employing barely 100 000 people. But the unit strongly recommends that formal land markets for sale and rental should be allowed and encouraged.
”We need a more eclectic and less rigid policy mix that accommodates all sectors,” Nega says. He supports an independent commission of inquiry on land, embracing all interested parties.
At issue, he says, is more than Ethiopia’s agricultural output. The government had used land policy as an instrument of political control, to stem urbanisation and independent thinking among peasants about where their own interests lie.
This was reflected in the state’s broader unwillingness to allow unhindered political competition. In such a populous country, it was unhealthy that one party held 95% of the parliamentary seats. In the view of independent observers, the 2000 general election was not free and fair.
”Control might help the ruling party survive for a while,” says Nega, ”but development is what individuals do to improve their lives; it is a product of the imagination. We must set people free.”