UB law professor examines reality behind Sub-Saharan land reform

As a native of Ethiopia, UB faculty member Mekonnen Ayano knows that for millions of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa, their lives revolve around their land.

Those without land, or at least access to land, often have no food. Without land, there is no way to pay for your children’s education, medical treatment, your basic means of sustenance.

What’s more, says Ayano, associate professor in the School of Law, land is a connection to community. Without land, belonging to that community, that culture disintegrates.

“Household lives and livelihoods are tethered to land for substance, and communities could disintegrate without a piece of land they can call home, for they derive their coherence from the land they collectively cherish,” Ayano wrote in his paper “Understanding the Local Complexities in Land Law Reforms: The Case of Land Inalienability in Ethiopia,” recently published in Law & Social Inquiry.

“Life does not have meaning if you don’t have community,” he says. “There is also culture. Culture is symbols, rituals; those are also linked to land. If you isolate people from land, one of the things that disappears is culture.

“Having land rights or some actualizable claim over a piece of land could mean the difference between life and death.”

Now you can understand the urgency in Ayano’s research. Infusing his work with his personal experiences and observations as a global citizen, Ayano closely examines the trend of privatizing rural land that was once owned by the government.

Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country, shifted toward capitalism and liberal democracy in 1991 after years of civil war under a socialist military regime. The post-socialist government restricted land sales to protect vulnerable farmers from being forced to sell their land due to droughts or other hardships. Almost 100 % of Ethiopian farmers rely on rain to grow crops and feed livestock.

Now, the country is at a turning point. 

According to Ayano, domestic elites and international development organizations are pushing to remove constitutional limits on land markets, moving Ethiopia toward privatized land ownership. Supporters of these changes argue that allowing people to freely sell land will boost agricultural investment, open access to credit and lead to overall economic growth. They believe removing these restrictions is key to achieving long-term peace and prosperity.

Ayano’s argument: Despite the efforts of international development agencies such as the World Bank, British Foreign Development and the U.S. government, their intentions — what they think about land in the rural development in Africa — and what actually happens is often very different.

“Designing law reforms based on theories of private property and market exchanges in Ethiopia’s capital based on recommendations from Washington, D.C., and Brussels to implement it in the diverse rural parts of the country would require the sort of capacity and legitimacy to control places and peoples over a sustained time that the Ethiopian government does not currently have,” Ayano says.

Ideas of what should be done, such as privatizing, free market and individual enterprise, may be intended to boost the economy, “good for social justice, good for the environment, good for security.”

“But what I am saying is it may not work the way you expect it.” Ayano’s research shows existing legal control over the land market has failed in practice because people who face expropriation by government and private speculators sell their landholdings through gifts, bequests, loans, leases and other legal fictions. Reformers understate the fact that individuals can get around formal legal rules more easily than we may think.

Ayano says his research is not as much about suggesting solutions as it is explaining how the law affects ordinary people, why these land reforms may not work the way outside agencies expect and fail to distribute land to those in need. “Looking at the ordinary occurrences can illuminate the real impact of the law,” Ayano says.

For the past 50 years, people in these areas have been buying and selling land as part of their culture and lifestyle.

“Now you have international development agencies telling them we have to privatize land so people can buy and sell that land,” says Ayano. “But people are already buying and selling land on their own.” 

Other times, politicians and lawmakers misunderstand the behavior of local people, and their proposals are destined to fail.

Competing and conflicting claims over land by various ethnic groups have fomented war and violence in the country, while millions have lost, or face the threat of losing, land, according to Ayano.

In this context, Western donors and development institutions, along with some of the influential politicians and intellectuals in the country, recommend a radical law reform to abolish the legal ban on land markets and create private, market-alienable land rights.

“They believe that such a reform could create a private property legal regime that promotes social harmony and economic development,” Ayano writes. “However, not only is this recommendation driven by an excessive focus on formal law, it is also oblivious to the ubiquitous land markets that go on in the shadow of formal law.

 “Reformers seem to lack humility,” he says. “They seem to overplay the ideas that we can fix the problem. One problem leads to another. You fix one problem, then find a bigger problem. It can be a process of trying to catch up with our problems without actually addressing them.”

Ayano says his intention is to show people if they can take a step back and take stock of what has been done so far, what has failed and what has not worked, it might lead to a better understanding of how to deal with social problems.

“This disconnect raises questions about the feasibility of creating private, market-alienable land rights, which requires far more than enacting a statute that says so,” Ayano writes.

“If a long-standing inalienability rule is not able to inhibit speculators from dispossessing smallholders through informal markets, a free market in private land rights would not stop them either. Instead, it may actually foster dispossession and aggravate the existing tension among the country’s ethnic groups, and well-off groups may easily buy out the less-well-off ones, recreating exactly the sort of problems that the inalienability rule was intended to prevent.”