This is the time of the most devastating pandemic the world has ever gone through in its long history. It is not clear how the pandemic will end and when it will end. Devastating epidemics have occurred anywhere in the world at different times so they did in Ethiopia.
The late historian and researcher professor Richard Pankhurst has written several treatises on the history of epidemics in Ethiopia in the 18th and 19th century but he has never come across something similar to what our world and our country are going through at this particular time. Among other things, professor Pankhurst’s writing tried to establish a link between epidemics and famines as causes and effects and vice versa. Epidemics in Ethiopia often led to the loss of the productive rural population and that led to food shortages and famines.
By the same token, famines greatly undermined the physical capacity of the rural population to withstand the devastating impacts of epidemics such as the Spanish flu that killed an estimated 40 000 people in Ethiopia. In his 1986 book called “Vulnerability to Famines in Northern Ethiopia” Professor Mesfin Wolde Mariam equally hammered on the same themes professor Pankhurst dealt with earlier.
Professor Mesfin attributed the famines of those days to the archaic feudal land ownership system that deprived peasants of the means of averting devastating famines. Despite the 1976 land reform proclamation in Ethiopia and farmers’ nominal ownership of the land they cultivated, the 1985-86 famine occurred largely due to maladministration and abuse of power.
He also held responsible the political or administrative system of the time for the famines. His work has no doubt contributed to the debate on land ownership and the need for changing the political system in order to prevent rural economic disasters.
The works of both intellectuals largely fell into deaf ears until the 1974 revolution brought the issues to the fore and made political change a top priority. The basic question that needs to be raised at this point is the following: are farmers in Ethiopia less vulnerable to famines or epidemics than they were in the last two centuries? This year marks the 45 anniversary of the issuance of the proclamation that granted land to the peasants.
This should occasion an objective evaluation of the impacts of the proclamation on economic, political relations in rural Ethiopia. However, such an evaluation has never been made although supporters and critics of the proclamation sometimes exchange heated arguments on the media. The proclamation has indeed altered the land tenure system in Ethiopia by introducing a radical changes that deprived feudal landlords of their monopoly ownership and terminated hundreds of years of exploitation and oppression of landless peasants.
Yet, for the last 45 years, land in Ethiopia has continued to be a very controversial issue that has polarized opinions and continues to do so. The debates and controversies have apparently refused to go as deep divisions continue to separate those who think the land issue is settled for good and those who maintain that land is not yet the property of the farmers in the true sense of the term. In other words, these people maintain that the 1975 proclamation has indeed liquidated feudalism but has neither made former peasants the true owners of their plots on which their livelihoods depends nor radically improved their socioeconomic status.
As early as two years ago, the land issue once again reemerged as one of the driving forces of economic and political reforms that are currently being implemented. At the heart of the reforms lie farmers’ demands for land security and illegal dispossession of their plots by big investors or the state in the name of development and the evictions that made life harder for them to bear. Critics of the land proclamation often argue by saying that this can be taken as another proof that farmers have what is called user right and not legally protected ownership rights of their plots. A dispassionate evaluation of the achievements and weaknesses of the land reform program in Ethiopia would however suggest that it has not eliminated hunger and food shortages among the farmers Ethiopians have not yet achieved food self-sufficiency. Every year, millions of Ethiopians still live on food aid, and there is a chronic residual of food deficit areas in the country.
In time of hardships such as climate changes that are translated into droughts, millions of farmers in traditionally food insecure areas are forced to bear the brunt of serious shortages and even famines. In the last 45 years since the land reform program that has done away with age-old feudal tenure and peasant dispossession, more than half a dozen serious droughts and famines have occurred in many parts of the country, including the cataclysmic 1984-85 famine that claimed an estimated one million lives. Since then, a number of lesser famines have hit many regions leading to serious food shortages that could only be partially overcome through domestic or foreign food aids.
This was however a contradiction in terms that is often overlooked or deliberately promoted. Land cannot be the property of the people and the state at one and the same time. It is either the property of the people, i.e. the farmers or that of the state or the government in power. Even if the government were a democratically elected one it cannot control land in the name of the people because land should be the private property of each and every individual farmer.
So, the myth about land belonging both to the state and the people has remained an illusion rather than a reality for the past 45 years and no attempt was made to demystify or rectify it. Many people believe that the current political and economic reforms in Ethiopia were partially triggered by farmers protesting against land grabs, illegal transactions, evictions and dispossessions.
Under such circumstances, how can one say that land is the property of the farmers while it is undoubtedly the exclusive property of the state that wrote and imposed the land reform bill and related laws in the first place? On the other hand, the government that came to power after the reform program was initiated has taken a few steps to modernize agriculture in order to make the farming sector a more efficient and more productive one.
However, in order to amend or revoke specific provisions in the 1975 land reform bill and requires measures that include looking into the bill itself and making the necessary change. This is not obviously the mandate of a transitional administration and the matter needs to be addressed by a new parliament that would emerge after fresh elections are held sometime in the future.
It will therefore be the mandate of the new parliament to look back at the 1975 proclamation critically and introduce the necessary changes. This is unlikely to happen very soon as the country is now totally preoccupied with the new challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic that has pushed all other issues to the back burner.
Sooner or later the issue of land ownership in Ethiopia is bound to resurface and provoke new discussions until it would be properly addressed or finally settled. We are now standing on the verge of a potentially devastating pandemic. The dark clouds of food shortages and famines are bound to follow the pandemic unless strong preventive measures are taken. In the old days, pandemics led to massive depopulations in the affected regions as peasants fled the areas for lack of food and fear of death. This pandemic is different in the sense that the rural population cannot avoid it by fleeing to other areas, even if that were a life saving option.
The pandemic is bound to spread faster than any population movement. Worse still, it might force millions of people leave to their jobs and stay at home without adequate means of feeding themselves in case of poor countries like Ethiopia in particular. There are already signs that the pandemic might spread to the rural areas later than in the towns and that it is bound to impact the lives of millions of farmers who are still vulnerable to food shortages if not famines.
Small and big towns to are starting to feel the heat as food prices are growing rapidly and in case the pandemic spreads, they are going to shoot through the roofs. Preventive measures are almost impossible to take because the state cannot foot the bills of such an economic disruption. Feeding the unproductive and jobless populations in big towns in particular is going to be another challenge.
The call this week by Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed on people to share whatever they have with their less fortunate compatriots might be taken as a signal that dark days might be coming faster than expected. It might be taken as a call for psychological readiness to share the burdens in case serious food shortages materialize. Whether it is possible to avert large scale food crisis by sharing whatever resources at our disposal might be a temporary remedy only in so far as people have limited resources to share with their compatriots.
This is also one of the reasons why total lockdown of the country to diminish the spread of the pandemic is not a realistic option as vice Mayor of Addis Ababa Takele Ouma recently indicated. Simply speaking, government does not have the required financial resources to allocate to people who stay at home or lose their jobs and incomes. It is rather a kind of vicious circle with only glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel.
The Ethiopian Herald April 12/2020
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
