Ploughing New Ground: Food, Farming & Environmental Change in Ethiopia by Getnet Bekele (review)

Over the past century, and especially since the late 1950s, successive Ethiopian regimes have sought to modernize and commercialize agriculture by pursuing often contradictory land policies and development approaches. In Ploughing New Ground, Getnet Bekele provides a rare and interesting, spatially disaggregated analysis of what became of farmers, herders, local landscapes, and Ethiopia's overall food security as a result of these efforts. The study focuses on the lake region of Ethiopia's middle rift valley, an area with high agricultural potential roughly marked by the towns of Bishotu, Hawassa, Adama, and Buta Jira in the north, south, east, and west, respectively. The main finding of the study is that none of those policies and programs has succeeded in completely transforming the region's complex cropping system, diverse herd composition, pragmatic land use patterns, and resilient landscapes. In the absence of structural change in the social and technological organization of production, the majority of people in the region have continued to rely primarily on some combination of crop cultivation and animal husbandry as their culturally preferred, as well as most economically viable, way of life.

Getnet Bekele depicts the nuances of this continuity by combining the methods of critical agrarian history and political ecology. This approach required an understanding not just of the hardships inflicted on farmers and herders by ill-fitting government land policies, but also of the agency of households and community-level institutions, as well as the role of non-human environmental factors in influencing outcomes. The book opens with a panoramic description of the region's salient bio-physical features and political economic conditions as observed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The most important of these included the prevalence of contrasting micro-ecologies (due to variations in altitude, topography, moisture, etc.), competing, and occasionally symbiotic, land use practices between settled farmers, nomadic herders, diverse ethnic groups, and influential lineage leaders but with fragmented authorities.

The first policy challenge to these features came in the decades leading up to 1916, when the newly centralized government of Ethiopia sought to increase food production and revenue from land by converting communally owned range lands into privately operated agricultural plots. This was to be achieved through cadastral surveys in which all land was measured using a roughly uniform unit called qalad. The land units were then to be allocated to individual users either as free grants by the royal court in Addis Ababa or by purchase from local government agents. In Ploughing New Ground, Getnet Bekele provides a compelling analysis that challenges earlier studies, which tended to view rural people in this and other parts of Ethiopia as hapless victims of this government policy. He argues that the actual implementation of the qalad system unintentionally increased pasture land. The main reason for this outcome was local peoples' strategic refusal to buy any of the newly apportioned land units. In the absence of any buyer, much of the land continued to be used as communal pasture, and this in turn led to the revival of grasslands and nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism. The book does an excellent job of discovering such paradoxes and unintended consequences.

That rural people were not hapless victims of perverse policies is further developed in several subsequent chapters. During the long reign of Haile Selassie (1917–1974), for example, rural people in the region responded creatively to a series of ill-advised policies. One of these policies that received coverage in this and several other studies involved dispossessing land from rural people to accommodate the regime's desire to grant land to urban-based government functionaries and soldiers who fought against Italian forces. This policy was vigorously implemented especially in pockets of highly desirable fertile areas, such as Ada, Lume, Gimbo, Aje, Meki, and Marqo. However, most of the grant recipients were unable to derive maximum benefits from the land...