This presentation is essentially road testing, framing for a book I'm currently trying to write,
and which attempts to synthesise about 12 years of research that I've done on the politics of land, the politics of agriculture,
social policy and employment in Ethiopia, some of which as part of this Affective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre,
which is based in Manchester and some of it sort of going back to my research some time ago.
And so it kind of tries to bring together a whole range of different key informant interviews with senior politicians, technocrats,
donors and then but then also a series of case studies on agricultural investments,
policy implementation, smallholder agriculture and land access and so on.
So the result of that may be that it seems as though I'm trying to cram in rather a lot into quite a short presentation for which I apologise.
I will point skate over some rather big debates quite quickly, so feel free to pull me up on that later on,
and I'm happy to discuss more in terms of what I'm doing now.
First of all, I'll try and lay out the basic rationale of the study and some of the key arguments that are put forward the
analytical framework that I used to analyse the politics of distribution or at least the core components of it.
And then the actual empirical analysis is going to be split into two main parts.
First of all,
looking at sort of the early era of what the TPLF and EPRDF have tried to do in Ethiopia in terms of distribution and then subsequently how
they responded to what they themselves termed as Armageddon or existential crises and the emergence of the developmental states agenda.
And then finally reflecting a little bit on more recent events in Ethiopia and what this means beyond that in terms of the rationale.
I mean, it's basically the purpose is to try and reconcile two quite distinct images of Ethiopia currently.
So on the one hand, you have the shining success stories of industrial parks at a slight railway and the Renaissance Dam.
I did say I've mentioned dams briefly, but I'm not going to dwell on them alongside the Oromo protests that have shaken the country
in the last few years and the current political turmoil that's going on within the country.
More precisely, I mean, the question is essentially why Ethiopia went through a period of relative political stability through
the night and through the 1990s and early 2000s in the midst of pretty modest economic performance,
for the most part. And then just as everything's taking off and you know,
you've got all these success stories which increasingly media and academic receiving a lot of media and academic attention.
At that point, the politics unravels and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Or we'll see where quite where it's going. And the argument is essentially that these are not unrelated to each other.
And so what essentially, what the paper tries to do is to zoom out from some of the sort of,
you know, some have been some really good analysis recently, particularly on the industrial parks looking at sort of how they're trying to
capture capture part of the global value chains and textiles and apparel and so on.
But to zoom out and set those kind of success stories or potentially emerging success stories in a much bigger political economic
historical context and to try and understand how the EPRDF's distributional strategy has changed and evolved over a longer period of time.
And then to sort of link to a kind of the big sort of theoretical question,
essentially that there's been a lot of work on the politics of development,
politics of growth in recent years, including by colleagues of mine in Manchester, but also people like Mushtaq Khan,
people within developmental state literature and so on,
which basically argues that certain forms of politics underpin periods of economic growth that you need certain forms of centralisation of power,
a coherent ruling elite and a coherent long term development vision and so on, and certain forms of state capacity.
Yet the process of structural transformation and economic growth in themselves transforms class structures.
Transfer leads to creative destruction and mobilisation of new political forces,
which then continually challenge the original politics, even if it even if it exists in the first place.
It's continually challenged by the mobilisation that goes with it and rapid economic growth.
So the question then becomes How do you actually manage that process in the longer term,
rather than just sort of the politics underpinning the initial launch of the growth episode?
But how do you actually maintain that and over a longer period entailing structural transformation?
And what the. Typekit doesn't do presentation, doesn't do I should probably clarify from the beginning,
the scare quotes around developmental state is not an accident in that I'm basically trying to sidestep that debate.
I'm not going to get into into the definition of debates,
which I'm not sure are terribly useful about whether Ethiopia is or isn't a developmental state.
It's kind of used in terms of the narrative of what the Ethiopian government calls its development, its development model,
its particular strategy at the moment,
rather than trying to get into sort of a definitional debate about whether it fits the sort of East Asian model or so on.
And I also don't claim to provide anything like a clear sort of a complete explanation
for the Oromo protests and the sort of recent political events which were,
you know, a fundamentally complex issues.
Although I think, you know, this distributional story, which I'll talk about, is part of that of that underlying process.
And also, sadly, I don't give any much of an indication about quite what the new administration is up to currently or what their evolving agenda is,
which I think is speculation from from anyone who really comments on it at the moment.
And so, yeah, the kind of the key arguments which are put forward is one that I mean,
there's been a lot of talk about how the EPRDF has sort of legitimised itself based on double digit growth in recent years.
So there's been a sort of a common narrative within the literature. Essentially, it's an attempt to sort of counterbalance that,
that they've always been essentially fundamentally concerned with distributional outcomes as well as just growth at all costs,
primarily because because of the aim, the impact of that distributional outcomes then have on social and political stability.
And second, the way that they've tried to sort of manage this distributional strategy and
manage political stability has evolved over time with changing political economy.
Initially, it was based around this sort of what I would call an agrarian model where they essentially trying
to secure guarantee access to land and to smallholder farmers as a key mechanism of distribution.
But gradually, that's worked through demographic changes, but also the developmental state agenda that's kind of no longer a plausible
option and increasingly resorting to other mechanisms of resource distribution,
particularly social protection. Within that, I mean, the other sort of dimension of distribution is obviously with respect to ethnicity,
and we'll talk about more about that later on. But essentially, there's fundamental tension that exists between the developmental state agenda,
which is inherently centralising projects with the with any kind of real distribution of powers within a federal system.
And finally, yeah, essentially that, you know, the challenges that are facing the country now.
Two of the principal challenges, I would say that are facing the country now in terms of distribution are reconciling with
two quite long standing challenges within Ethiopia that in a new manifestation of them,
but goes back to some of the debates right back to the 1960s and 70s.
In terms of one livelihoods, how do you guarantee that a large section of Ethiopian population access to to, uh, to a secure livelihood?
And secondly, the role of ethnicity within politics? So in terms of the theory, I, as I say, I won't spend too long on this.
But in the starting point is actually the literature on the, you know,
the most of the advanced literature was that in terms of theoretically is the literature on
the welfare state and trying to understand in terms of how distribution is is is managed.
But that literature, I mean, it takes a village to see a very particular starting point and assumes the existence of a labour market.
And the primary challenge in terms of distribution is in terms of the contingencies
and risks that exist with it with respect to an established labour market. So unemployment in old age and so on.
And that then leads to certain forms of social protection,
whether it's social insurance and models or social assistance, you move to an agrarian society.
You face a very different set of challenges. And I would argue the most.
Yeah, the main risks that are faced within an agrarian society would be how to guarantee
access to agricultural production in terms of key inputs that you acquire.
So land, labour and other other agricultural inputs that are required for reliable production.
And within that context, Jeremy Satan's work is being useful in terms of identifying what he calls an agrarian welfare regime,
where he argues many African states have historically both in terms of concrete actions, but also in terms of narratives.
Sought to provide welfare primarily through access to land and other agricultural inputs,
rather than some of your formal social protection programmes. The challenge is that in most developing countries are at sort of intermediate
points where they are making a rather uncertain transition between the two.
So. And as you know,
in terms of the agrarian side you have the agrarian welfare regime is no longer if it ever was able to provide secure and secure livelihoods.
A majority of the population in terms of land shortages, shortage of agricultural inputs and so on, and unreliable unreliability of production.
And at the same time, on the other side, industrialisation, high,
high productivity services haven't necessarily taken off and provided the max employment that many would hope for.
And so there's this sort of balancing act of processes of both the commodification of commodification.
Sorry, in this embedding, creating a labour market and employment opportunities,
but then equally in the planning and planning terms, these attempts to expand social protection and decode modify these processes.
So essentially, what I'm trying to do is sort of set the scope of my analysis in terms of access to land, agricultural inputs,
employment and social protection as the kind of key mechanisms of distribution and how
these are managed within a process of transformation in terms of the politics of this.
Erm, well, I'm going to talk about now draws again quite a lot from the sort of welfare state literature in terms of
viewing distribution as ultimately a political struggle between different interest groups within society,
within the within the institutional constraints and of the existing state structures.
But at the same time, it also builds on a broader body of work, which looks at the role of ideas within politics.
So basically the argument that interest groups you can't just necessarily just read off the material
interests of a particular class is based on based on their position within the system of production.
But ideas fundamentally shape the interests and the and the actions of a different state and societal actors.
Taking that as a starting point and then is necessary.
As you know, there's a lot of literature on the politics of politics and development in recent years,
which highlights that you need to fundamentally reinterpret those ideas because politics
in developing countries very often works in quite fundamentally different ways.
First of all, you can't take political competition for granted.
Very often, political mobilisation is severely constrained.
And so while it's certainly possible for groups to mobilise politically,
very often you have state actors and political elites acts in anticipation of
the threat for their assessment of the distribution of power within society,
rather than necessarily in response to mobilisation, active mobilisation to the class which is ratified within this welfare state
literature in terms of class mobilisation being the key driver of redistribution.
Class may or may not be the most fun, most sort of salient form of political mobilisation in developing countries,
and it's necessary to sort of examine how class interacts with other factors such as ethnicity, region and region and religion, and so on.
And finally, the informal institutions fundamentally shaped the way that politics actually works.
So you need to go beyond the formal institutions of the state and understanding these processes.
Now. I'm setting myself up for a problem here, and you know this this is my the sort of core of the theoretical framework that I'm looking at,
but obviously this then bleeds into a whole range of issues related to agrarian political economy,
sort of state led developments, global political economy and even demography.
So I'm going to set those theories aside slightly rather than tackle them all and try and then spend an hour talking to you about theory.
But yes, I am wrestling with those issues and I'm happy to discuss more if people have questions.
But I want to move on, first of all, to that sort of more empirical material.
So, yeah, starting with the early years of the TPLF and what that ultimately became the EPRDF.
So for those of you who are not Ethiopian specialists,
the two people after Tigrayan People's Liberation Front began as a sort of anti-government insurgency in the mid 1970s,
gradually for Civil War and ultimately came to national power in 1991 and in the process formed this multiethnic coalition,
the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, which then came to national power.
Now the argument, of course, is essentially that, you know,
two underlying principles have sort of underpinned their strategy for mobilisation both and from the insurgency and moving forward.
First of all, they pursued in the insurrection was a Maoist political strategy of mobilising the peasantry where right from the beginning,
they basically recognised that tangible, broad based socio economic progress was one of the key means of mobilising people
make basically making it clear to people that they would benefit from TPLF rule.
So the main the main ways they did that initially was intent in terms of land reform and then service delivery in liberated areas.
But at the same time, they also had a very distinct ethno nationalist message.
They mobilised the Tigrayan people based on sort of rationale narratives that Tigrayans had
been oppressed within Ethiopia and that this was the sort of a liberation struggle as well.
And these sort of principles have been taken forward when that when the TPLF came to national power.
First of all, they redrew the structure of Ethiopian politics in terms of creating what's been come to be known as ethnic federalism.
So that's the map of Ethiopia pre 1991. That's what they they redrew from and from the new constitution in terms from 1994 onwards.
Essentially, what they did was try to draw around ethno linguistic groups.
So to provide self-administration for the different ethnic linguistic groups within Ethiopia and to provide them with self self-determination,
that self-determination and decentralised administration.
Now the reality of it is quite different and the decentralised structures were implemented across the country.
But in terms of the actual, meaningful devolution of power,
it was still significantly constrained in terms of both the strength of the federal government over the regional states,
but also the party structure, which you know, had maintained central central powers over over a lot of different policy areas.
Now, as many people have written in the literature, this was partly about maintaining the dominance of the ADF,
undoubtedly, and no doubt the TPLF left within that,
but it's also necessitated by the development strategy that they they employed as the other half of this sort of legitimising rationale.
And so, yeah, quite early on in 1994, they laid out this.
So even in 1993, I think the first version was they laid out this economic development strategy.
This character here is no,
I gave it up who was here last year as part of was a part of the north of the Horn of Africa series or Northeast Africa series of separate event.
And that was a separate event, a separate event, Martin School. But yeah, he was here last year.
He was one of the architects of this strategy, along with the Prime Minister Meles.
And that strategy right from the beginning. I mean, it was fundamentally concerned with distributional challenges as well as economic growth.
I would argue, and particularly the challenge of population growth, marks that out as the single overriding challenge facing the country was.
He expressed it. It was there was the challenge they were facing was a race between population growth and growth in agriculture,
which had to be five had to be one in favour of agricultural growth.
The concern being that population growth is going to result in extreme rural land
shortages is going to exacerbate the existing already existing problem of food insecurity,
which had been an issue since the 84 famine and long before.
And that in the absence of the capacity of the agricultural sector to absorb large numbers of people,
it was then going to result in the persistent onslaught of rural to urban migration and therefore thereby political instability.
So essentially, there was this race against time from from the, in their view,
to raise agricultural productivity and ultimately to industrialise and create industrial employment, which would then be able to absorb this labour.
So this is my sort of stylised version, slightly stylised.
I mean, it's based quite quite close to the literal electoral strategy and in many ways of what
they were trying to do in terms of agricultural development led industrialisation.
So essentially, their starting point was state land ownership, which had been created by the previous Marxist regime.
The TPLF itself, it had reduced. Richard Land in liberated areas,
but state land ownership became a mechanism of ensuring that smallholder farmers
retained access to land and land was relatively equally distributed within the country.
The idea was that if you provide technology to these farmers that doesn't replace labour but raises productivity things like fertilisers,
improved seeds, irrigation. Oops, wrong way.
You'll be able, first of all, to raise agricultural productivity, providing wage foods, industrial inputs, primary exports,
which will then be able to earn you foreign exchange internationally and ultimately
help you to support a conscious effort on promoting labour intensive urban industry.
And then the idea is that you'll then start to be able to provide linkages back and forth between them that smallholder agriculture,
as farmers become more wealthy, will be able to, will be will become a domestic market for locally produced industrial goods.
You can then start to produce value added exports and as industry really takes off.
Ultimately, you'll be able to transfer surplus labour from the agricultural sector into the industrial sector.
Now, this is a sort of a strategy for essentially resolving all of Ethiopia's problems.
The assumption is that essentially, oh quite explicitly, all farmers will be able to benefit from these technologies.
Essentially, there'll be scale neutral, and so it will solve both the problem of food insecurity, but also raising productivity.
It will drive industrialisation. But it was also fundamentally a political strategy and quite explicitly so.
The idea was you keep people in rural areas where they can't be a political problem initially,
and you only allows the rural to urban migration as employment is created in the industrial sector and to gradually
allow that transition to take place with state land ownership being one of the key mechanisms by which this is done.
And in many ways, this sort of typifies this agrarian welfare regime that I mentioned before.
And you know, it's a it's a mechanism of providing welfare and support to small farmers through access to land and access to agricultural interests.
Now it was always a bit aspirational. I think it's fair to say that the idea of a land land as a safety net, probably in 1993,
like the last land redistribution and most of the country where in the late 1980s,
you know, landless ness at that point in time was with was fairly low.
But already by 2001, when they relaunched this strategy, you know,
there would have been sizeable numbers of people 10 years or more after the last land redistribution,
who would have thought it would have lacked access to land.
And in terms of the implementation, you can point to various different failings of what actually happened on the ground.
Nonetheless, this was a sort of an important attempt in terms of a distributional strategy that was relatively egalitarian,
as Prime Minister Meles, who is well aware of the challenges that they were facing and the limitations.
So in his view, what constitutes the nightmare scenario would be that you don't have agricultural productivity increases,
you're not able to create or farm employment. Essentially, you have extreme food insecurity, rural landless ness.
And as a result,
large numbers of people coming to the cities where they're going to can cause all kinds of trouble and threat a threat to political stability.
Now, essentially, what you had in the early 2000s was and continuing since then are manifestations of that central challenge, I would say.
You had what the political leadership at the times, the deputy prime minister, Marla's and others termed a series of Armageddon.
So these existential political crises, which ultimately sort of in Iraq, wasn't the sort of a one off reform,
but a gradual process of evolution of strategy led to changes in and in in the development agenda.
The key facts being first of all in terms of the urban protests in 2001,
starting in the university and spreading across the city, but then also in 2005 and with a heavily contested elections,
then essentially the recognition within the leadership that this strategy focussed on
agriculture to a significant degree to the neglect of urban areas was no longer supportable,
that it brought severe risks not, you know,
not assuming that focussing on agriculture and assuming that ultimately this was going to lead to an urban transformation as well,
and that you needed to do something about urban areas much more urgently rather than just waiting for agriculture to deliver number one,
the food crisis in 2003 kind of really question many of the rationales underpinning Adley.
In that year, some 14 million people required emergency assistance and as a.
Result of a major drought, but it's the big question this narrative of agricultural productivity increases.
Solving the food insecurity problem. Raising raising productivity and creating a surplus in general.
And ultimately the TPLF splits where which basically led Somalis emerging as sort of uncontested leader within the TPLF
and ultimately the EPRDF and centralising power around him essentially enable this switching strategy that followed on.
Now, as part of that, they're also through a range of different people, academics and advisors that they may engage with.
They particularly talked about Amazon's and apparently mothers.
Read Alice Thomson's book sometime in the late 1980s and then told all his economic advisers they
have to read this wonderful book and then a range of other people who were brought in to advise,
advise them at different points in time. And it's hard to chart exactly what influence that had, but clearly was part of the story.
And then the final part, I think, which is also important was the following 2001.
They they they carried out this process of decentralisation, which massively increase the capacity at local government level and levels,
and actually gave them a realistic chance of being able to implement some of this agenda at local levels.
So what this has ultimately turned into is this developmental state agenda.
I mean, roughly speaking, I think you can chart it to around about 2005, but it's definitely a sort of an evolution and sort of over a period of 10,
15 years, the pictures along along the right hand side of what sort of is normally associated with this agenda.
So you've got a down there industrial park, which is one of the most recent ones and horticultural farms, large scale investors and sugar plantations.
And it's notable that in terms of analyses of actual actually of Ethiopia's growth experience, these don't actually figure very much.
They not very notable in terms of the analysis in the case studies in the Sun shining examples,
the main sources of economic growth and Ethiopia has been growing very rapidly in recent years,
have been massive debt financed public infrastructure in terms of railways, roads, dams and so on.
And then in urban construction boom.
Yeah, alongside that, these there are, you know, there are some fun and other important economic priorities as well within the smallholder sector.
There was essentially a recognition that this idea you could provide technology to every single smallholder in
Ethiopia and raise that productivity has been sort of accepted that that was not that was never going to happen.
And there's been attempt to focus on the high potential farmers.
So concentrating supplies of agricultural inputs to what they've been termed model farmers who tend to be amongst the most wealthy.
But then also it's a strategy for political mobilisation,
as well as an increased focus on commercialisation have been land reforms which have gradually started to introduce market incentives into the
land into land tenure by removing restrictions on rental and most recently allowing mortgaging in certain parts of the country and soon to be,
it would seem, across the country.
And very recently, there's there's a push that now they've building these big agro industrial parks, which will link.
The theory is at least 400000 smallholder farmers to go to a central agro processing plant,
which was then add value to the crops that smallholders are producing.
So all initiatives focussed around commercialisation of the most,
the highest potential farmers alongside these capital intensive agricultural investments.
So broadly speaking, you can make a distinction between the horticultural farms,
many of which have been quite successful around Addis Rift Valley and other sort of other key
sort of transport centres and the large scale plantations that the guy with the tractors,
RAM Khatri, a large scale Indian investor who amongst other large investors, has been a complete disaster and a massive failure.
And then finally, you have industrial policy.
So I mean, there's been there was a push right from the beginning to explicitly target labour intensive industrial sectors,
particularly textiles and apparel, based on the assumption that these would be these would create, create more employment, absorb more labour.
And and I think I mean, research has shown, I mean, they are quite impressive.
There has clearly been a lot of thinking going on from the government side. They have been clearly quite proactive.
Yet in terms of the overall economic contribution is still pretty minuscule as these industrial parks that they visit and by all accounts,
it seems that many,
many major global firms are set to relocate significant chunks of their production to Ethiopia, so there's a potential for it to grow quite rapidly.
But for the time being, it's remains quite limited.
And so in terms of the sort of continuity and changes, I mean, there's a clear continuity in aspects of this,
and the Ethiopian government still says that it is pursuing Adli.
And there are continuities in the sense that, you know, there's a common focus on industrialisation and structural transformation of the economy.
There's a focus on, as I was previously on, linking agriculture and industry.
So you sort of you add value within Ethiopia rather than rather than exporting primary commodities.
And yet there are also important changes. So they've kind of ditched the agriculture first approach.
And now it's sort of a dual agriculture and industry at the same time, but trying to promote linkages between them.
But fundamentally, they focussed on high potential rather than this, a broad based strategy.
And in that sense, I think that's the key fundamental differences in terms of this distributional strategy.
That, first of all, is X and now an explicit intention to differentiate between smallholders.
So not the assumption that everyone will be able to benefit, but an acceptance grudgingly in many quarters that the least able are going to have
to move out of agriculture and land reforms that allow rental first in Amhara.
Now? Now. Under consideration by the federal government and these and the provisions to allow mortgaging of land are clearly targeted
towards allowing providing the highest potential farmers with the opportunity to expand production and intensify production.
And with the result that many of those less able are going to have to move out of agriculture,
that's completely different from the rationale of idli and something that wouldn't have been considered for a long time.
Indeed, for many years, it was. The assumption was that mortgaging was against the Constitution.
It's only roughly that people have looked at the wording carefully and wondered whether perhaps it isn't, after all.
And so there's the assumption that people will now start to move out of agriculture.
But the challenge is that the question is where where do they actually go from that?
You have a situation of mass landless ness. So there has been, as I said before, there's been no redistribution in most places since the late 1980s.
Massive population growth in that period. About to do another census in another in a couple of months.
But according to the last census in 2007, somewhere in the region of 80 percent of the population would have been less than 18
in the late 1980s and therefore would not have access to land through redistribution.
Now, some of those people would have inherited land.
Some of them would be able to sort of use a bit of land from their parents on a more informal basis.
That's a huge chunk of the rural population that don't have access to land.
And so this rationale of land as a safety net that the government had pushed for years is no longer supportable in any meaningful way.
There's a lack of data, but yeah, I mean,
there's a couple of studies recently who suggested that somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 percent of the rural population lacks land.
On the other hand, you've got this sort of emerging success story in manufacturing some major firms relocating to Ethiopia.
This was kind of the has been the holy grail for the Ethiopian government for several decades.
Yet at the same time, it's not creating the employment as yet and possibly seems unlikely to ever do so.
That is required to absorb this enormous, enormous amount of surplus labour.
So currently, the industrial parks have to provide somewhere in the region of 20 or 30000 jobs.
There are some optimistic targets that by 2025, they might create some two million jobs,
which, if it ever happens, will be a great achievement, undeniably.
But at the same time, it still pales in comparison to a population of 110 million people,
where somewhere in the region of a million new young adults enter the job market every single year.
And studies suggest that if the limited studies that exist suggest very high rates of urban unemployment and rural endlessness and.
Yeah, and at the same time, then these industrial parks themselves are then built on labour suppression,
so there's been increasing concerns about the working, the working conditions within the industrial parks themselves.
And essentially they're based on internationally. They're competitive because of the extraordinarily low wage costs,
not because of any any any higher productivity within Ethiopia is basically a low wage mechanism of trying to secure parts of the global value chain.
And alongside this, you've got the developmental state and displacing people for a range of different rationales.
So I mean this this this state land ownership has gone through various different phases in terms of the objectives,
the rationales by which it's justified. Increasingly,
it's been justified in terms of the centralisation of rents and the ability for the state to allocate factors of production to priority sectors.
So what this means is essentially that people are displaced for agricultural investments,
for industrial parks, for infrastructure development and also a key issue being urban expansion,
which cities across Ethiopia are expanding extremely rapidly to provide an example of what this actually means in practise.
This is from a study we did recently in Adama.
So Adam has gone through waves of different expansion, both the suspension of the city, but also then in terms of infrastructure.
So back in 2008 and then near to the city, there was the expansion of the Whenshe show a sugar factory,
which displaced a certain number of small farmers. At that time, they were paid 800 per square metre.
So currently, the exchange rate is somewhere in the region of thirty five to the pound.
But yeah, it would have been a bit less at that time 20 10, 12 per square metre for the expressway,
linking a dominant Addis 15 verse to the railway that goes from Addis through Adama on to Djibouti 53.
But for the most recently for the industrial park that was built there at the same time in terms of illegal land sales.
By all accounts, you can buy. You can sell land for up to 1000 birds per square metre on illegally on the legal illegal land markets.
Now, unsurprisingly, this is quite a strong incentive for people to sell land.
So essentially what you've got, it seems increasingly clear that around most urban centres, around most of infrastructure development, whether where,
where there's clear sign that at some point the state is going to come in and dispossessed you with with very minimal compensation,
there is what was described by one respondent as an economy of anticipation.
Essentially, this rush to sell land as quickly as possible before the state arrives and essentially,
although still formally it state ownership privatisation of land is well underway in many places.
Now, the government's aware of this in the current context.
Local governments are unable to intervene. Stop this. These practises, and there's discussions within federal governments,
are talking about a new draught compensation proclamation, whether it will come to pass or not.
I don't know. It's been stuck for a little while now. By all accounts. But yeah, the provisions within that,
the revised provisions within that are only that will increase compensation rates by somewhere in the region of 50 percent,
which obviously is going to come,
not even going to come close to closing that gap between current compensation and what you can actually get by by selling land.
So into this mix of mass landless ness and very high rates of unemployment.
Essentially, what you're seeing is the emergence of a new forms of redistribution, and this has been going on over over an extended period of time,
both in response to these earlier Armageddon, but also in response to this embedding processes of the developmental state.
So, you know, the principal programme within this is the productive safety net, which was this a direct response to the food crisis back in 2002 03,
which was yeah, as one of the largest social protection programmes in Africa, covering up to 10 million people in terms of cash and food transfers.
This was initially intended by government to be, as I termed, a mechanism of keeping things calm while we're implementing this other economic agenda.
It wasn't really seen as a solution in itself. The solution was rapid economic development, industrialisation and employment.
But yes, the SNP was seen as a sort of intermediate sticking plaster, which would keep things calm while it was being implemented.
But yet, 14 years later, enrolment increases rather than decreases.
It's still somewhere in the region of eight to 10 million people enrolled in it.
In informal discussions, many government officials will admit that yes,
that is a massive underestimate and really, you should have somewhere in the region of five.
Four more million people who should who who meet the criteria of being chronically in food insecure,
which is the rationale for inclusion in the programme and so should be on the on on it,
but it's considered politically unacceptable to actually increase the numbers at this point.
And you also have responses and social protection responses in response to the urban crises of 2001 2005,
most directly in the sort of youth development package which promoted messages from 2006,
food subsidies from 2008 and most recently, then this urban safety net urban counterpart,
where some half a million people will soon be receiving support. Now, of course, a poor, productive history regime that seems to be emerging.
Essentially, this is this is the poorest part isn't sort of a reference to the sort of tradition of providing narrowly targeted poor relief.
I'm going back to the English Paulos. The productiveness part is this of long standing rationale within the ADF.
For any support that you provide to people has to come back with contributions.
So people have to they can't just be given money or resources without contributing themselves.
They have to also work and be seen to be working for the support they receive.
So there's this rationale that these programmes are going to make a productive impact as well,
which argue about whether that's actually materialised in practise.
And so in terms of, I haven't mentioned ethnicity for some time, which is probably probably relevant in that,
you know, the developmental state agenda has essentially I mean,
I would I would argue this is fundamental trade off between the interventionist developmental ism,
which is fundamentally a sort of centralising development model and real and real federalism.
So whether that's in terms of, you know, federal government allocating land for agriculture investments,
could there control over the creation of industrial parks, infrastructure and so on?
It requires federal intervention into regional states and essentially, I mean,
in addition to a whole range of political motivations in terms of centralising power just in terms of the economic strategy itself,
as as a fundamental tension between the federal and regional governments.
And now the challenge that sort of increasingly come up is that, you know, and very,
very often the narrative is that Ethiopia, you know, Ethiopia is making this big sacrifice for national development.
You know, there's a process of delayed gratification rather than necessarily seeing the benefits.
Now you're saying, you know, these are these are necessary steps to sort of create development over over the coming years.
Now the problem is that within a ruling party that continues to be continues to have been,
I should say, perceived as dominated by the two by one minority ethnic group.
This then, rather than national sacrifice, comes across as ethnic exploitation.
And over the years, you've seen an increasingly assertive set of ethno regional administrations, the regional states contesting federal control.
Now, I would have said this was happening to some degree before Melas passed away in 2012.
So, yeah, particularly governments and Oromia and Ham are increasingly protective of their own autonomy, but very much since then.
The removal of the kingpin, the removal of the central central power and the fragmentation of the centre has led to this sort
of devolution of powers in practise and regional governments becoming increasingly assertive.
And the result is that gradually distribute distributional concerns have become increasingly influenced by ethnic politics as much as anything else.
So let's take a couple of recent examples.
You know, this strategy of building industrial parks is influenced very much by the criteria of fairness between the between the different regions,
rather than necessarily a strong business case.
The most obvious example being the decision to build an industrial park in a sofa in the far west of the country,
which has no rationale in terms of trade linkages.
In terms of labour of availability or anything else but is based is basically a political decision based
on the balancing act across Ethiopia's regions and equally within the industrial parks themselves.
There are quite clear ethnic ethnic quotas of where you know, of the labour of the labour and employment opportunities within the industrial parks.
I feel I should mention or go through the guys have a discussion about the Oromo protests themselves quite explicitly.
And essentially, I'm sure many of you are already familiar, so I wouldn't say anything terribly new.
Widespread anti-government protests beginning in 2014, but really accelerating in 2016 17 and culminating in 2018.
They were very brutally put down by the military initially. And but yeah,
that felt have failed for any significant period to stop them and ultimately
culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Mariam about a year ago.
Almost exactly. Yeah, there were a range of different flashpoints within this, but central concerns were both.
The flashpoints were around land territory displacement and growing ethno nationalism,
and this perception of the oppression of the Oromo dominance of the Tigrayans within government.
But the these were these were protests conducted mainly by young men in rural areas, small towns.
Exactly the kind of people who have you know this?
This emerging development strategy offers no real answers to the people who see no real options within the agricultural sector,
their chances of inheriting land and having a viable agricultural livelihood pretty much gone.
Many of them are quite well-educated now, and so agricultural livelihoods aren't particularly desirable anyway.
But equally, in urban employment, opportunities are quite limited. There's a handful of industrial jobs in industrial parks, but then, yeah,
poor working conditions or perception of poor working conditions within them.
And the other alternative being they labour in urban urban centres, which is unreliable and poorly paid.
And so it's yeah, particularly this group who you know, who've seen little little option from the current distribution system,
which worked well amongst the main protagonists in the protests. And I haven't mentioned Abby hardly at all.
Yeah. So he took power in April last year and as unless at least all kinds of manner of political reforms upended the political landscape in Ethiopia.
I'm not going to comment too much on that other than, you know,
the implication of this analysis is essentially that there are two fundamental distributional strategies which he
or indeed his successor were to lose power in elections which are supposed to be held next year will have to face.
And that one how do you create employment opportunities,
livelihoods for a rapidly growing number of Ethiopians who also have also increasing expectations
given the educational attainment that they've that they've increasingly been getting?
And but then equally, how what role does ethnicity play in politics in Ethiopia or what role should it play?
And particularly this challenge of how do you reconcile the sort of the centralised state that's underpinned this period of rapid
economic growth with the desire and increasingly the reality of real federalism and real devolution of power from the federal government?
Now, in many ways, I mean, it's far from a perfect match,
but these are sort of new manifestations of two central challenges that go back to the 1960s.
As I said before,
in terms of the land of the land to the tiller campaigns in terms of land redistribution and also the national question as it was framed.
So it's something of an irony, then, that despite the fact that if you had the IDF, which came out of that movement,
identified these two factors as the central concerns for its own power has been unable to definitively resolve, either.
And while I'm particularly recently the sort of ethnicity element has attracted a lot of attention in terms of
there've been widespread conflicts which have often ended up polarising along ethnic lines and over the last year.
I suspect it may well be the former, which is at least as hard, if not harder, to actually resolve resolve ultimately as a follow up to that.
And the debates points within this has been sort of a question of whether this state led
development model that the IDF has been pursuing should be retained as though it's a choice.
Certainly, that was the sort of more or less the framing of Alex Devil's piece that you wrote last year, which was quite good in many ways,
which basically said, you know,
these are the challenges of ditching the developmental state and pursuing a political marketplace that this theory puts it.
Yet to my mind, the politics that under underpin this state led development model have evaporated quite some time ago.
Essentially, I think there is this fundamental tension between state led development and the form that's been pursued in Ethiopia and real federalism.
Currently, the ruling coalition is fragmented into all kinds of different factions, which,
you know, the idea of getting any kind of coherent vision out of them is it seems highly unlikely.
It's unclear even what Abiy or anyone else wants in terms of the development model that points.
They've sort of said we're going to continue with the developmental state and state that development, other provinces liberalisation.
Is unclear, but ultimately,
I think Ethiopia is probably just too diverse and politically mobilised at this point to submit itself back to this sort of highly centralised,
somewhat coercive developmental state agenda.
And there's increasing this push for distribution now rather than delayed gratification for for the future.
And the final point, I mean, it's clear from case studies that we've been doing across the country in the last year or so.
Well, Somalia is one of the one of his claims of one of the crowning achievement was in terms of building state capacity.
And in his terms, he said, runs in every village or something,
somewhere that affects essentially whatever they decide at the top would get implemented at the bottom.
They have that capacity across the country. Now is this probably still existent agreeing to a significant degree there is this.
The central control in those structures are there at local level.
Case studies we've done in Amhara and Oromia in the last year, they just not like the valley administrations,
you know, local local population very often just telling them to get lost.
Essentially the sort of instructions that come down from the top to mobilisation, the campaigns, you know, being required.
If those local administrators are brave enough to try and try and rally the rally, local population,
local people are ignoring them and the the structures through which they're mobilised.
These development teams, these one to five groups, which groupings of households and subsections.
Within within a village of evaporated.
So they still exist in Tigray, but India and the rest of the country, they don't seem to be a major feature whatsoever anymore.
And I decide to stick this last slide in, which is a bit more speculative, but I would be keen to get people's thoughts.
So I'm to my mind,
there's been a lot of analysis of and talk about African industrialisation and in the last few years and some very good analysis of which
Ethiopia is kind of at the forefront and it clearly has had a very clear industrial policy and has had certain successes that flowed from it.
So the question comes back. So if this is the success story and in many ways, it is the success story.
What does ultimately African in the success of the success of African industrialisation look like?
Now, I don't pretend to have an answer, an answer to this, but it does raise a whole series of questions around,
you know, going back to the agrarian question of labour, Henry Bernstein and others in terms of the role,
the role of agricultural labour within a capitalist economy, particularly given growing population pressure,
landless ness, decreasing farm size, very clear trends in terms of industrialisation from the early industrialised.
This through to the present of increasing capital intensity and reducing labour intensity of industrial production.
And what Tanya Murray has to have term this challenge of surplus labour labour that isn't required by capital and what to do with it.
And so it raises the possibility, at least, that, you know,
one one sort of interpretation of where Ethiopia is heading is that maybe it
will continue with its success in terms of industrialisation and manufacturing.
But essentially,
you might end up with a sort of high productivity manufacturing sector in a sea of relatively low productivity services and agriculture.
Now the government is clearly thinking in those terms and has been trying to establish links to the rest of the economy.
But the successes so far seem to have been quite modest, and we'll see where it goes in the future.
I will leave it there, and I welcome your comments. Thank you.