There are ambiguities, inconsistencies, gaps and outdated features in theThere are ambiguities, inconsistencies, gaps and outdated features in thelegislative protection of some property rights in Ethiopia. Moreover, there isthe bestowal of wide and undue discretion to various administrative authoritieswithout judicial scrutiny. These problems clearly lead to discretionary andarbitrary administrative decisions and inconsistent court rulings thereby posinginsecurity in the protection of property rights.

Equitable access to land is vital for inclusive economic growth,sustainable development and food security in Africa wherenumerous processes, including those related to globalization,population growth, increased demand for food and biofuels,tourism, urbanization, nature conservation, mining, andclimate change increase pressure on land. Diverging interestsand competing claims from the global to the householdlevel need to be managed – to prevent conflict, to protectlocal rights and livelihoods, to stimulate inclusive economicdevelopment and to ensure food security. Effective landgovernance is central to managing land-based claims and theoften accompanying processes of inclusion and exclusion.

The study uses five rounds of household panel data from Tigray, Ethiopia, collected in the period1998–2010 to assess the impacts of a land registration and certification program that aimed tostrengthen tenure security and how it has contributed to increased food availability and thusfood security in this food-deficit region. Our first survey took place just a year before theintervention (the land certification program). Our panel data in combination with the “years ofcertificate ownership” variable allow us to assess the dynamic impacts on food (calorie)availability of strengthened tenure security.

In poor agrarian economies, land is not only a key factor of production but also performs an essential roleIn poor agrarian economies, land is not only a key factor of production but also performs an essential roleas an insurance device and a social safety net. Ownership of land can provide access to credit which willenable households to make indivisible investments they would otherwise have not been able to undertake(Galor and Zeira 1993, Banerjee and Newman 1993).

Over the coming decades, land policy and administration, for urban as well as rural areas, will becritical for Ethiopia’s development. The vast majority of people making up the FederalDemocratic Republic of Ethiopia’s (FDRE) predominantly agricultural economy live in ruralareas. There, land continues to be a key household asset and functions as a safety net. Hightenure security will be critical to provide the incentive to invest in land. Tenure security willincrease productivity and encourage transfer of land to its most effective use, thus contributing tothe growth and transformation of the agricultural as well as the transition to more urbanizationand industrialization.

This paper examines variation in perceptions of tenure security and satisfaction with customary land governance across rural communities in four African countries. The objectives of the paper are threefold. First, using baseline data from four USAID-funded impact evaluations, the paper describes pre-treatment levels of resource tenure and property rights in Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, and Zambia. Second, the paper examines community satisfaction with land governance, including assessments of leadership accountability and transparency in land-related decision-making. Third, the paper provides a comparative analysis of subgroup differences within and across countries. The particular subgroups of interest for the analysis include female-headed households, youth, and resource-constrained families.

This report examines the evolution of Ethiopia’s ‘political settlement’ and its implications, consequences and risks with regard to the organization and provision of security by state forces. The report’s analysis leads to three key insights. First, the TPLF/EPRDF strategically controls state security forces which, given the party’s quasi-monopoly on political power, often makes it difficult to distinguish instruments of the state from the party. This creates a situation in which state security forces may serve national interests but in which these interests are defined on the basis of a particular ideology and they also sustain existing power structures. Second, the combination of de facto centralization of authority and security with de jure decentralization of autonomy to Ethiopia’s regions, in recognition of their social and developmental diversity, creates inconsistency in matters of security, in terms of both intent and performance. Third, the military serves both as a combat force and as a vehicle for development. This happens mainly through the vehicle of ‘METEC’, a military-run conglomerate. While this seems sensible from the perspective of strengthening party rule and enhancing implementation capacity for development strategies, it also increases the risk of corruption, nepotism and inefficient resource allocation.

The papers presented at the seminar provided a great deal of information about: theinterrelated problems of land degradation, low agricultural productivity and poverty in theEthiopian highlands (emphasising the administrative regions of Tigray, Amhara and Oromiya);the proximate and underlying causes of those problems; the responses of individuals,communities and governments to the problems; the impacts of some of those responses; andthe constraints and opportunities affecting the potential for more productive, sustainable andpoverty-reducing development pathways in the Ethiopian highlands in the future.

In Ethiopia, people have been dominantly agrarian society with subsistence way of living. They havemainly made their livelihood by tilling and herding. Mixed agriculture has been dominant economicactivity. Food production has been the most important activity of the peasants. Agriculture has remainedmore or less static for centuries and people have been indifferent to material wealth. Little has been doneto transform peasant agriculture of the country. The failure and static nature of the Ethiopian peasantagriculture could be associated with interlinked historical, natural, religious and cultural factors.Though important it was, in the Ethiopian academics, peasant agriculture has never been recognizedas an important development issue until the recent times. No attempt has been made to bring internaltransformation in the thinking and working habit of the people. This contribution, based on desk reviewsand unpublished sources, is concerned with the issues and history of essential features of the Ethiopianagriculture, including post-1974 rural policy and agricultural developments. The study also explored theeffect of religion and culture on thinking and working habit of the people.© 2017 Agricultural University of Georgia. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open accessarticle under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

The Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation (MoFEC), with key sectoral ministries r,the Ministry ofAgriculture and Natural Resources; the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change; the Ministryof Livestock and Fisheries; and the Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Electricity) has been spearheading thedevelopment of the Multi-Sector Investment Plan (MSIP) for climate resilience to scale up ar;:tions related tothe 2"d Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP-2), which incorporates many of the elemenris of the CRGEStrategy. The MSIP development process is being supported by the World Bank Grorrp, the AfricanDevelopment Bank, Climate Investment Fund's (CIF) Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) andother partners.

Building its framework with the random utility model as a base, this study makes use of the multinomial logistic model to examine the factors leading to differences in farm-households’ preferences for various forms of land conservation measures. Using a survey of 4,795 household-plots in rural Ethiopia, the study demonstrates the inappropriateness of pooling different forms of land conservation investments in preference studies. The empirical results suggest that poverty drives farm-households towards land conservation measures which are more short-term and which entail the expenditure of less skill. While tenure security has a mixed effect on such preferences, market access seems not to matter for preference decisions. Further, farm-households consider the characteristics of the plot in their preference decisions, which also vary across villages. Overall, this study shows that a farm-household’s preference is a complex decision. Major changes in conservation investments on the part of farm-households will require attention to many factors, as no single factor exerts enough control to be used on its own as a major policy leverage instrument.

This paper investigates the role of rainfall and its variability on theimplementation of soil conservation strategies in the degraded lands of Ethiopia. Wecombine farm household panel data, farm specific weather data, and subjective rate oftime preferences measured by an experiment conducted in two different points in time.We find that rainfall variability reduces effort in soil conservation and increases farmers’elicited impatience. Future patterns of increased rainfall variability may thus reduce thepossibility of private investment in soil conservation both by directly reducing theinvestment in conservation and by increasing farmers’ impatience. We also provideevidence that impatience measures are not stable and not fixed in a developing countrycontext. Behavioural parameters respond to climatic shocks.

Increasing salinity remains a challenge to sustainability of irrigated agriculture in Ethiopia and South Sudan as it reduces natural biodiversity as well as farm and livestock productivity. To date, an estimated 11 million ha (Mha) land in Ethiopia is exposed to salinity and sodicity. The salt-affected areas in Ethiopia are in the Tigray region, and Awash River basin and the situation is expected to exacerbate further in the future due to climate change induced factors. The salt-affected lands in South Sudan are in the White Nile irrigation schemes and yet the area has hardly been utilized for agricultural production despite having great potential due to availability of water from Nile. In other parts of South Sudan, low soil fertility and non-availability of good quality seeds for crops and forages are the major bottlenecks in the development of agriculture. With a 3% average population growth in these countries, future food security and livelihood source for the population remains a challenge to the governments.

There is now a growing consensus that, even in rural African contexts where individual titling of land maynot be desirable or feasible and use of land as a collateral for credit is at best a distant possibility, providingpoor land owners or users, who are often female, with options to have their rights documented can yieldsignificant benefits. These benefits, which come about largely due to the ability to draw upon formalmechanisms to enforce property rights, include incentives for land-related investment, enhanced genderequality and bargaining power by women, improved governance, reduced conflict potential, and lowertransaction costs for productivity-enhancing land transfers through either rental or sale.

There are important changes in tenure arrangements andpractices since 1975 but with mixed performance. Among the positiveattributes of these changes is the simplification of the complex tenuresystems as compared to the pre-1975 period albeit questionable ifsuch level of homogeneity has a desirable mix of tenure arrangements.A large segment of the farm population is able to access and operateland.

Soil degradation is one of the most serious environmental problems in Ethiopia. TheEthiopian highlands have been experiencing declining soil fertility and severe soil erosiondue to intensive farming on steep and fragile lands and other factors attributed topopulation pressure. Although different soil and water conservation structures haveextensively been introduced over the past decades, sustained use of the measures was notas expected. The limited success of those efforts highlights the need to better understandthe factors that influence sustainable use of structural soil and water conservationmeasures.

Over the last two decades Ethiopia has experienced strong and increasing growth in its agriculturalsector, which has played a major role in reducing poverty and improving food security. TheEthiopian agricultural sector is currently undergoing even more significant changes as it moves from mainlysubsistence farming towards greater commercial production, partly through the introduction of large-scaleagriculture.

Ethiopia has experimented with land law reforms linked to agriculture-led national developmentstrategies that Emperor Haile Sellassie I, Derg, and EPRDF introduced since Emperor Menelik IIenacted modern Ethiopia’s first reform intended for development in 1908. Nonetheless, the country’ssmallholder productivity averaged 1.0 ton/hectare and its poverty ranked 174th in the UNDP HumanDevelopment Index in 2011.

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Integrated Household Extension Program (IHEP) in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. The government of Ethiopia – in contrast to the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – invests heavily in agricultural extension but very little empirical evidence is available on the impact of public extension services on farm performance and household welfare that could justify these investments.

Land degradation is a major problem in almost all the countries. In most of the developing countries, population pressure and small farm sizes, land tenure insecurity, land redistribution, limited access to credits and limited education are the factors leading to unsustainable land management. In Ethiopia, among many factors, tenure insecurity is considered as a main problem for land degradation. The frequent land redistribution and the changing pattern of land ownership with the change in Government made the farmers insecure of their land resulting in not making land related investments. Considering this fact, the Government of Ethiopia started the Rural Land Registration and Certification Programme (RLRCP) since 1998/99 to provide land titling and tenure security to the farmers.