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Ethiopia: Title to the Tiller
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Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
ANALYSIS
24 December 2007
Posted to the web 27 December 2007
For six years, Ethiopia has been conducting a massive campaign to give farmers certificates to the land they and their families have worked, in some cases, for generations. The certificates are part of a strategy to bolster rural development by providing greater land tenure security. Still, some say that without the outright privatisation of land, the certificates alone will provide little benefit, Fortune staff writer ELIAS MESERET reports.
Abera Waqayoo, 28, took off his hat out of respect for the Oromia Regional State official that handed him a certificate to the one hectare of land he has cultivated his whole life. He smiled faintly as he slipped the paper into his jacket pocket and, looking rather embarrassed, slipped back into the group with his fellow farmers.
Abera is one of around 15 farmers in the Dendi Woreda, Gare Arera Kebele of the West Shewa zone who received their land certificates on December 5, 2007 in the presence of several reporters and more than forty African, Asian and other delegated experts brought to the remote area by GTZ, Germany's overseas development agency.
He and his neighbours are receiving an unusual amount of attention amid a debate over land tenure and land ownership in Ethiopia, with some saying that the paper he now holds does not provide him enough control over his land. Abera, at least, feels more reassured.
"I am very happy now because I am feeling more secure than ever before," he told Fortune.
Abera's certificate is one of thousands being granted by the Land Registration and Distribution of Land Certificate Programme, which was started some six years ago by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD) with the financial and technical support from the World Bank and US Agency for International Development.
The programme is in line with the passage of Land Law Proclamation No. 133/2006, which obliges a land user to have a land holding certificate, and operates in four regions: Amhara, Oromia, Tigray and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples regions.
With the programme, Ethiopia is following in the footsteps of other countries that have embarked on massive land tenure programmes, largely motivated by the urgings of the World Bank and donor agencies like GTZ. In Africa, Benin, Madagascar and Mauritania, for example, have already completed their pilot programme and are heading for the wider implementation phase.
Land is a key asset for many people throughout the world, especially for those who live in the developing world. In Ethiopia, land is accessed mainly through state-mandated peasant associations called "tabias," which are informal and inefficient, though the main problem for the country remains shortage of land to sustain the large rural population. Worst of all, persistent land degradation, caused by an interrelated mix of man-made and natural events, is gradually taking its toll on the poorest of the poor, thereby reducing the land's economic value.
The programme presumes that land management will be improved once owners or holders of the land have greater security on their property.
According to the data obtained from the MoARD, insecurity of land tenure seriously hinders communities and people from realizing economic and non-economic benefits such as sustainable management of resources, greater investment, incentives, transferability of land, improved credit and market access as well as independence from discretionary interference by bureaucrats.
MoARD's emphasis on land tenure may represent a new shift in Ethiopia's land tenure policy.
Previous to the land reform of 1975, which vested land rights to the state, the land tenure system in the country had variations in different regions. While in the southern part landlords were holding a huge tract of land with full ownership rights, customary land rights in the form of rist were dominant in the central and northern parts.
Be this as it may, the concomitant misery and oppression of the Ethiopian people in general and the farmers in particular ignited the widely acclaimed "land to the tiller" slogan that resulted in the 1975 land reform which allowed land to be possessed by individuals as a private property. After the fall of the Derg regime, however, the 1995 FDRE constitution put land under the ownership of the state, but allowed the right to use land indefinitely.
However, land insecurity is now considered a serious problem in Ethiopia. According to a study conducted three years ago, an average household believes that it will be able to operate its land holding in the future with only 54% probability (or a 46% probability of losing once holding). That's why the government is embarking on a massive land registration and certification programme.
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The insecurity problem is not the only driving force for the programme, though.
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