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  • Contingent Variables and Discerning Farmers:Marginalizing Cattle in Ethiopia’s Historically Crop–Livestock Integrated Agriculture (1840–1941)
  • Getnet Bekele

Much like crop production, livestock production has been an integral part of Ethiopia's diverse agro-ecologies for millennia. For a number of farming communities in the Ethiopian region—such as the Zalan, the Arsi, the Boran, and others—cattle keeping has been (and to some still is) not only an economic activity but also a way of life. In the dominantly ensete (Ensete ventricosum, the 'false banana' plant) cultivating region, located in the southern parts of the country, cattle were important both as a source of food (ensete foods are preferred with meat or diary products) and manure (to replenish soil fertility in the crop fields). In the central and northern highland region, which is conventionally classified as a "cereal complex," the historical evidence suggests that cattle and pasture were integral parts of the agricultural landscape until the close of the nineteenth century. Since the late nineteenth century, however, livestock production seems to have shrunk in space progressively. This change in the magnitude of livestock production has been particularly conspicuous in most of Ethiopia's highland region, where farmers in the past combined crop and livestock agriculture, and in areas such as Arsi, where one-time cattle herders resorted to crop production at a much faster rate only in the twentieth century. The result has been a dramatic decline in highland farmers' per capita livestock possession, with implications ranging from changes in rural families' calorie intake to a severe shortage of plow-oxen.1 [End Page 83]

What were the circumstances that precipitated the decline in per capita livestock production in Ethiopia's highlands? How did the changing configuration of crop and livestock production, in turn, impinge on broader trajectories such as ecology management and property rights? This article seeks to examine how environmental and political processes impacted the place of livestock in farmers' organization of production over time. The focus is primarily on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for which there is tractable evidence with which to document these changes with a degree of reliability. Spatially, the article covers the Shewan highlands, where the evidence is relatively strong and where the pace of the transformation appears to be more dramatic than elsewhere. Only tangentially are the lowland region and the highlands to the south and north of Shewa addressed in this study. The data come from European travel narratives, contemporary Ethiopian documents, and informants' testimony. Three important variables are singled out for the purpose of this article: land use, pathogens, and the dynamics of resource entitlement rights. The article argues that the most enduring factor in shaping the synergy of crop and livestock agriculture in the Shewan highlands concerns the politics of access to resource control and the severe competition that resulted from this.

Land Use and Livestock Production in Nineteenth-Century Shewa

The recorded evidence for livestock's place in historic Ethiopia's highland agriculture is rich. From the early-sixteenth-century Portuguese traveler Manuel Almeida to the late-eighteenth-century Scottish James Bruce and the early-nineteenth-century British agronomist Douglass Graham, and to Graham's fellow countryman Augustus Wylde, who came to Ethiopia late in the same century, the host of European travelers who lived in or visited Shewa, Wollo, Gonder, Tigray, and parts of Gojjam observed a range of agrarian communities that cultivated crops and raised cattle. According to Almeida, cattle were normally very large and farmers reared them in great numbers in the highlands, where they constituted the principal wealth of the people.4 Two centuries later, Bruce reported that Gojjam, Wagara (in Gonder), and Tigray possessed [End Page 84] large cattle populations.3 Similarly, nineteenth-century travelers such as Henry Salt, Douglas Graham (1841), G. Bianchi, and others painted a picture of highland agriculture endowed with both crops and livestock.4 The noted Ethiopianist Richard Pankhurst, in his characteristic narrative style, summarized their testimonies to reconstruct the state of historic Ethiopia's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cattle agriculture in detail.5 In a far less accessible work, Donald Crummey also recognized the disparities between the nineteenth-century practices of pastoralism and...

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