Priceless land: valuation and compensation of expropriated farmland in the Amhara region, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

In Ethiopia, farmland belongs to ‘the people’ (the state) and cannot be sold or bought, but compensatory measures have been introduced for land expropriated for infrastructure and industry. The article analyses processes of valuation and compensation of land in Kombolcha district in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Here numerous projects have affected highly productive farmland over the last decade. Monetary compensation to land holders whose farmland is expropriated is relatively new in Ethiopia, and we explore how peasants and authorities gradually have attained increased competence in dealing with land valuation and compensation, faced with often obscure and contradictory legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Land expropriation
• rights
• land rights
• peasant-state relations
• compensation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Prunier, “The Meles Zenawi Era,” 228.

2 Wolf, Peasants.

3 Ege, “An Unstable Land Tenure,” 140.

4 Standard Amharic terms for administrative levels are rendered in English here: kelel (‘region’), zon (‘zone’), wäräda (‘district’), qäbälé (‘commune’). These terms can refer to an area, organisation or administration at both state and federal levels. In this article, we refer to rural communes in the Kombolcha district, located in South Wälo zone, Amhara region.

5 E.g. Aspen, Competition and Co-operation; Dessalegn, The Peasant and the State; Gebru, Power and Protest; Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Wolf, Peasants; see also Krohn-Hansen, Resistance.

6 The military – and later socialist – government that was in power from 1974 to 1991 is commonly referred to as the ‘Därg’ (‘committee’ or ‘junta’).

7 The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, the party formed by a coalition of regional movements, has been in power since the fall of the Därg in May 1991.

8 Ege, The Promised Land.

9 Atakilte, “State Policies”; Clapham, “The Ethiopian Developmental State.”

10 Crewett and Korf, “Ethiopia: Reorming Land Tenure,” 208; Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation; Dessalegn, The Peasant and the State, 206.

11 FDRE, “Constitution”; FDRE, “Rural Land Administration Proclamation 89/1977”; FDRE, “Rural Land Administration and Land Use Proclamation 456/2005.”

12 FDRE, “Constitution,” 14.

13 Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation, 6–7.

14 A phrase borrowed from Rapport, “Foreword.”

15 See Ege, “Peasant Land Tenure,” 35–40 for a more detailed discussion of these concepts in relation to the Ethiopian highlands.

16 Wolf, Peasants.

17 Ibid., 15.

18 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 29.

19 Crummey, Banditry; Gebru, Power and Protest.

20 Aspen, “Models of Democracy,” 69.

21 The following account is based on our field notes from February 2018.

22 See Aspen, “Rural Land and Urban Aspirations” for similar expectations in a North Wälo community.

23 “The proclamation” (i.e. FDRE, “Expropriation of Landholdings for Public Purposes”) was mentioned many times, and it seemed that many had knowledge of it.

24 Levine, Wax and Gold.

25 Article 4(5) of the proclamation states: ‘Where a landholder who has been served with an expropriation order refuses to handover the land within the period specified in Sub-Article (3) of (4) of this Article, the woreda or urban administration may use police force to takeover the land’.

26 Aspen, “Models of Democracy”; Lefort, “Powers – Mengist – and Peasants”; see also Tronvoll and Hagmann, Contested Power; Vaughan and Tronvoll, The Culture of Power.

27 The project later decided to omit land where houses were located from the sub-station construction site.

28 Mesfin, Rural Vulnerability; Dessalegn, Famine and Survival Startegies.

29 Devereux, Sharp and Yared, Destitution in Wollo. A good description of the physical environment of South Wälo is found in Mesfin, Suffering Under God’s Environment.

30 Kahsay, “Diagnosis and Intervention Plans,” 5.

31 Little, Economic and Political Reform, 118.

32 Mesfin, Suffering Under God’s Environment, 27.

33 https://www.akhrailway.com/.

34 Kombolcha City Mayor Office, “Kombolcha Town Data Profile.” In 2007, the population of Dessie was 147,507 and that of Kombolcha 83,765 (CSA, “Statistical Amhara,” Table 2.5). The official population of Dessie is now 250,346 (Dessie City Administration, verbal communication, 17 December 2018).

35 Fiquet and Hussein, “Kombolcha,” 419; Zenebe Consult, “Study Report,” 69–72. This airport was phased out and replaced with a new one, which is located close to the industrial park, the railway station and the dry port (the railway and port were under construction in 2018).

36 Informal group interview with elders at the inauguration of a new mosque in Quranguyé, 22 February 2018. Grazmach and qägnazmach designated grades of the azmach (commander or warlord) (Chernetsov, “Azmač”). In imperial times, land given to servants of the state was known as gala märét, as opposed to gäbar märét, which referred to privately owned land that was transferred between generations via inheritance.

37 Yeraswork, Twenty Years to Nowhere, 101–3.

38 In the early 1980s, cooperatives were ‘imposed on a largely reluctant peasantry’ (Dessalegn, “The Unquiet Countryside,” 251; see also Dessalegn, “Agrarian Change”). Those who willingly joined the cooperatives received preferential treatment and were assigned the best land, while those who did not join were evicted. Since the imperial regime and until quite recently, resettlement was practised by the Ethiopian state against a marginalised peasant population (Piquet and Pankhurst, “Migration, Resettlement & Displacement”).

39 Dessalegn, Agrarian Change, 49.

40 Ibid., 50.

41 Yesuf Ali was a local leader at the time of the Därg. He narrated the history of the producers’ cooperative, claiming that the kapitén (‘captain’) had much land that was tilled by tenants, and ‘the awraja [subprovince] people came and asked us to start farming. They organised us, and we built houses here’. They produced a variety of crops, including t’éf, maize and vegetables. Half of the produce was kept for consumption by the farming households and the rest was sold at the market (Interview with Yesuf Ali, 6 March and 13 October 2018).

42 Fiquet and Hussein, “Kombolcha,” 420.

43 Muluwork, “Assessment of Livelihood,” 47.

44 Most affected peasants had plots of land also elsewhere, and lost only some of their land, not all, to this project.

45 The land was to be occupied not only for the sub-station, but also for service buildings, stores, etc.

46 The Ethiopian calendar starts on 11 September (except in leap years) and lies seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar. In this article, we have added eight years to the years mentioned in our Amharic sources, unless the specific date is known.

47 Amhara Kelel, “Rural Lands Measurement.”

48 Interview with Biniam Demsé, expert on land compensation and alternative means of livelihood, Kombolcha Town Administration Rural Land Management Office, 18 March 2018.

49 Ahmäd Yämam, chairman of the commune that lost the most land to the airport (qäbälé 07, Abakolba), said that he had worked with matters related to land expropriation and compensation valuation, ‘starting with the airport’ (interview, 26 February 2018). Another big project in Kombolcha around the same time was the new campus of Wollo University (Kombolcha Institute of Technology), which affected a different Kombolcha commune than the ones examined in this article.

50 Interview with Yesuf Ali, 6 March 2018.

51 Interview with Biniam Dämsé, 25 February 2018.

52 Land acquisition for the railway, alone, comprised 890 cases within Kombolcha district (ERC and Yapi Merkezi, “Awash – Kombolcha – Hara Gebaya Railway Project”).

53 Interview with Biniam Dämsé. 25 February 2018.

54 Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation.

55 Ibid., 166.

56 Dessalegn, “Agrarian Change,” 47. In Kombolcha, land was expropriated for the construction of a textile factory in October 1983. At this time, according to our informant, the fields were full of grain crops ready for harvest. Monetary compensation was not an issue at the time, but the affected farmers were provided with land ‘elsewhere’ (Interview with Yesuf Ali, 6 March 2018).

57 Ege, The Promised Land; see also Dessalegn, “the Peasant and the State,” 203.

58 The birokrasi lost all land beyond 1 ha (4 t’emad), forcing many of them to search for sharecropping contracts for sustenance. There is general agreement in the literature that the Amhara redistribution of 1997 was politically motivated, aimed at crippling former local leaders (Ege, “Introduction,” 11; see also Witten, “The Protection of Land Rights,” 161).

59 Ege, “Introduction,” 11.

60 Dessalegn, “the Peasant and the State,” 203.

61 Interview with Ali Säyäd (commune chairman), 21 February 2018.

62 Deininger, Ali, Holden and Zevenbergen, “Rural Land Certification”; Holden, “From Being Property of Men.”

63 Dessalegn, The Peasant and the State; Dessalegn, “Peasants and Agrarian Reforms”; Ege, “Land Tenure Insecurity”; Ege, “Introduction.”

64 Dessalegn, “the Peasant and the State,” 2019.

65 T’emad is a local land measurement, conventionally converted to 0.25 ha.

66 Interview with Ali Husén, 6 March 2018.

67 See Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation, 278ff.

68 Three categories of land were used: irrigated, rain-fed and grassland.

69 Compared with the results of models based on actual prices and growth rates, the compensation for farming land expropriated in Bahr Dahr were, on average, 40 per cent less (Wubante, Van Passel, Sewnet, Adgo and Nyssen, “Take out the Farmer”).

70 FDRE, “Constitution,” Article 40(1); Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation, 230.

71 Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation, 252.

72 Amhara Kelel, “Rural Lands Measurement,” paragraph 14/II.

73 FDRE, “Expropriation of Landholdings for Public,” Article 8(2).

74 It was reported that, while in Tähulädäre district, ch’at plants were compensated with 7,000 birr each, the rate employed in Kombolcha communes was only 500 birr (Inteview with Biniam Demse, 1 May 2018; Interview with Ahmed Yämam, 5 March 2018).

75 In Bahr Dahr, crop residues were not included (Wubante, Van Passel, Sewnet, Adgo and Nyssen, “Take out the Farmer”).

76 Interview with Biniam Demsé, 25 February 2018.

77 This is also commonly reported in the research literature (e.g. Bikila, “The Impacts of Development-Induced Displacement,” 58; Daniel, Land Rights and Expropriation, 256; Muluwork, “An Assessment,” 93).

78 FDRE, “Expropriation of Landholdings for Public Purposes.”

79 Interview with Husén Ali, 22 February 2018.

80 Interview with Ali Säyäd, 18 March 2018.

81 FDRE, “Constitution,” Article 40(4).

82 Aspen, “Conclusion”; Ege, “An Unstable Land Tenure System.”