Changes beyond the State Institution: Socialist Policies and Land Tenure in aCoffee-Growing Village, Southwestern Ethiopia

抄録

The transition to socialism in Ethiopia brought a drastic change to the rural areas. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the socialist policies of the Derg regime (1974-91) on a coffee-growing area where the state strongly intervened. The main focus is on the historical change of land tenure.
By tracing the historical process a coffee-growing village has experienced, it becomes apparent that socialist policy such as land nationalization and agricultural socialization not only integrated rural land that the peasants had owned and used, but also tried to“nationalize”the peasants through three national organizations-the peasant association, the state farm, and the producers' cooperative. Furthermore, the analysis of land tenure dynamics reveals the fact that the influx of migrants, which had started during the first half of the twentieth century, was accelerated under the socialist policies. This enormous influx of population caused land scarcity and lengthened the duration of unstable tenancy that could have been settled by the land redistribution. Despite the state's massive intervention under the Derg regime, social change in a rural area did not go exactly as intended by the political center. It is the movement beyond the state institutions that has created the conditions for changes in rural communities.