ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the international actors and channels, particularly because there has not been a detailed case study in the comparative literature on land tenure that documents such a wide range of foreign interventions. It looks at Ethiopia's development history and its complexities. In 1960 Ethiopia was one of Africa's most underdeveloped countries, despite adequate land mass, generally fertile soils, sufficient rainfall, variety in climate and elevation, and a hardworking peasantry. International agencies, foreign government aid missions, and non-Ethiopian advisors, researchers, and educators were involved in Ethiopian land tenure policies since the early 1960s. From the end of the Italian occupation until the early 1960s, Ethiopian development policy emphasized large-scale commercial farming of export crops and largely ignored the large subsistence sector. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the lessons about international involvement in land reform that can be drawn from the last twenty years of Ethiopian development.
