ABSTRACT
Over the past decade Ethiopia’s rural land tenure systems have been the subject of renewed but, as yet, unresolved debate. At its simplest the debate has been framed in terms of land privatization versus state ownership, with the former position associated with several of Ethiopia’s major donors, especially the World Bank, and the latter forcefully argued by the Ethiopian government. At issue is the trade-off between economic efficiency and social equity. The Ethiopian government maintains that state ownership combined with state allocation of usufruct rights, through regular and equitable redistribution, is the only way of guaranteeing access to land for all Ethiopians. These ideological considerations notwithstanding, the government’s stance also rests on fear of the alternative:
We do not see the commoditisation of land as economically rational at this point … We do not have the necessary levels of economic growth to allow for productive peasant displacement. Major social disruption would undoubtedly occur as a result of land sales. A significant unemployed and unemployable sector would result.
