Land Reform In Ethiopia

The major land reform in Ethiopia took place in 1975 where all rural and urban land was nationalized, and rural land was redistributed to individual households with household size as a main allocating criteria. The distinct feature of the land reform in Ethiopia, compared to other developing countries, was the sporadic nature of the redistribution, which had been implemented throughout the country between 1975 and 1991 (Adal, 2002). A regime change occurred in 1991/92 and another redistributive land reform was implemented in 1996/97 but this reform was only in Amhara region (Ege, 1997; Gelaye 1997). By employing a household survey data, we investigated the long-term consequences of the 1996/97 land redistribution in Amhara region of Ethiopia on soil conservation methods especially on the sloppy ones, intensity of intermediate input uses such as organic and inorganic fertilizers, and finally agricultural productivity. The total effects of land redistribution are decomposed into tenure security and allocative

First, we use a randomly selected sample of farmers from the nearby villages of neighboring Oromia region as controls. This is because the farmers in both regions had been under the same centralized military administration regime systems and farmers in both regions were subjected to the 1975 radical land reform and also to the subsequent sporadic redistributive land reforms until 1991 regime change. The ethnic federalism system was adopted after the 1991 regime change. The major difference in land reform between the two regions after regime change is the 1996/97 redistributive land reform in Amhara. Thus, once we control the observable characteristics, then the differences in the dependent variables between the Amhara and Oromia region could be attributed to the 1996/97 land reform in the former. We use GIS information to identify nearby control villages to minimize agro-ecological differences between the treated and control villages. For instance, barley, wheat, teff, and beans are the dominant crops accounting roughly 80 percent of the total cereal and pulse plots in 2013/14 in the treated as well as control areas. The incidences of types of crop damages such as shortages of rainfall, flood, insects, are not statistically different between the two groups. Data from the Central Statistical Authority (CSA) for the 1996 harvesting season (i.e., pre-land redistribution period) shows that there were no