The Land Debate a Fight for Dignity, Not Mere Economics

Jul 11 , 2026
By Mekonnen Solomon

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Behind the argument over private title lies decades of farmers denied credit, coerced into repayment and, at times, jailed for debt, writes Mekonnen Solomon (ehdaplan@gmail.com), an agricultural economist working for the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA).

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Since the question of whether land should pass into private ownership or remain under state control was added to the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission's (ENDC) agenda. It has sparked a wildfire of controversy.

As I watch it unfold, society remains deeply uneasy, caught in a cycle of suspicion, hope and fear.

The advocates of “state” ownership argue, as they have for decades, that privatising rural land would push peasants back toward the serfdom of the feudal era. They fear a wealthy elite buying up peasant holdings, leaving rural families destitute and trampling the rights of communities and social segments.

Farmers, this camp insists, lack the property knowledge to be trusted with a title. They would argue that, if allowed to sell, they would squander their land and slide back into servitude.

Many scholars now reject this reasoning. They find the notion that farmers cannot handle private property a condescending trap, one that assumes the people who feed the country are not clever enough to manage their own affairs.

The evidence points the other way. Given the legal right to control their land, these experts note, farmers have proven careful and capable stewards of what they hold.

Free-market advocates argue that a modern agricultural economy cannot be built while land stays locked in rigid state control, barred from being bought and sold like any other asset. They find it insincere for a government to liberalise services, foreign exchange, banking and insurance while keeping rural land, the most important tool of agricultural production, sealed off from the market.

Others read the shift as a political manoeuvre. The incumbent Prosperity Party (PP), they claim, is keen to distance itself from the rigid dogma of the EPRDF, which once vowed that land would stay under state control at all costs.

Others see the pressure coming from outside. The wish to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), with steady pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is a powerful motive. The sluggish growth of the farm economy is blamed on the absence of rural land as a tradable asset, which holds back investment across the sector.

This "untouchable" agenda reaches far beyond these macroeconomic and political clashes. Having spent years in agricultural project and programme work across the Amhara Regional State, I have seen up close how questions of land are bound up with the basic dignity of citizens.

For over 30 years, since the fall of the Derg regime, rural farmers have faced barriers to reliable capital, the very thing they need to modernise their farms and buy inputs. The government's strict land policy blocked them from using their most stable asset as collateral.

Framed by the ideology that land is “public property” and cannot be sold or traded, it restricted their ability to raise the funds needed to meet growth demands.

The consequences arrived quickly. After the Derg fell, private financial institutions were free to venture into rural areas, but they took one look and stepped back. They could not accept peasant land as collateral because the law forbade it, and nothing was clear about what a lender could do if a borrower defaulted.

It was a shock that left the government anxious, its promise of rural credit colliding with the logic of its land policy.

To plug the gap, the government established "rural credit associations," which over time grew into microfinance institutions such as the Amhara Credit & Saving Cooperative. These bodies were capitalised through regional endowment funds drawn from the annual budgets allotted to districts and weredas, so public development money stood in for the collateral that the farmers could not provide. It was a workaround, not a solution.

Predictably, the arrangement buckled. Many farmers could not repay, and the answer was draconian. The government leaned on rural development workers, agricultural staff and community leaders to force repayment, seizing movable assets and, where that failed, sending farmers to prison. There is a dark irony in this.

The approach dragged not only development and agricultural workers but also the courts, meant to stand independent, into doing what they had no wish to do.

Almost everywhere in the world, fixed property is the tool that frees human labour from the crushing weight of debt. To imprison a person's conscience and labour for failing to repay a loan is not merely unlawful. It is an assault on dignity.

International standards, including the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR), generally prohibit jailing anyone for failing to meet a contractual debt. A system that does so violates the dignity it claims to serve.

As the crisis deepened, the lenders reached for the "group lending model," copied from Bangladesh without a careful look at its consequences. The model required farmers to form credit groups in which every member stood as guarantor for the others, so when one defaulted, the rest were bound to cover the debt.

However, experience from Bangladesh and elsewhere makes it plain that such models, imposed without land security, produce catastrophic results. The social effect, too, was devastating.

The burden often forced the guarantors to take the defaulting farmer's land as compensation, setting off an involuntary and shadowy transfer of land from people experiencing poverty to the less poor. This exploitative cycle drove the marginalisation of the weakest peasants, pushing them into poverty, becoming labourers for wealthier farmers or migrating to the towns.

Where the first land distributions had averaged half a hectare a household, the same failure let a few to accumulate five, 10hct or 15hct, often the people celebrated as "model farmers" who were, in truth, beneficiaries of the quiet and illegal consolidation of their neighbours' plots.

The damage to professional integrity has been profound, turning agricultural experts into debt collectors and jailers when their calling was to teach and guide.

Very recently, the state has rolled out fuller land-use proclamations and land-use-right certificate schemes, a welcome step. But the land question is not a dry matter of economics. It is a fight to free farmers from the cruel, backward practices inherited from an age of debt-bondage.

Will the coming national dialogue take this nightmare into account and give it the honest hearing it deserves? Or will it be reduced, tragically, to a narrow quarrel about group rights, while the deeper wound, the one I have watched bleed across the countryside for a generation, is left untreated once again?.

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PUBLISHED ON Jul 11,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1367]

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