Knowledge, power, and a region: The making of Ethiopia's south-central Rift Valley agricultural environment and society, 1892--1975

This dissertation examines the environmental, economic and agricultural history of Ethiopia's south-central Rift Valley. This area exhibited a strong livestock-based agriculture up until the third decade of the twentieth century. Beginning around 1930, the region's agricultural environment underwent dramatic change. Marking this transformation was the rapid "cerealization" of most of the south-central Rift Valley region and the proportionate decline of livestock production for the remainder of the twentieth century. This study explores the course, causes, and patterns of the valley's agricultural evolution through a study of the forces and social actors that shaped it over time.; In this study I demonstrate that the valley's agricultural transformation since the last decade of the nineteenth century is intimately associated with competition and negotiation over agricultural resources and output. Because of its proximity to the geographic locus of the modern state and its attractive agricultural resources, the valley was among the regions that came under relatively enhanced state control early on. The first three chapters of the dissertation analyze the region's prewar agricultural transformation in the context of local forms of production organization, evolving terms of access to resource control, and infrastructure development.; The changes in Ethiopia's postwar national political economy affected the Rift Valley's agrarian character in profound ways. The imperial state's relative success over its regional power contenders fostered a relaxation of prewar policies on rural land and labor. A concomitant process in the post WWII period was the appropriation by the state of the ideology and practice of development as a tool for building a modern state. State relaxation of stringent prewar policies on agricultural resource allocation fit well with the changing desires of Ethiopia's emerging bureaucratic elites that vied first for controlling rural land for rent, and then far commercial production. At the same time, state appropriation of development also led to the launching of a series of intervention regimes aimed at transforming farm production and rural society. The valley was one of the regions where the new round of competition over agricultural resources and the country's Green Revolution-inspired interventions materialized with relative intensity. The second half of the dissertation explores both processes to explain the actual procedure of crop-livestock change in valley agriculture to 1975.; In light of the radical land reform the Derg promulgated in March 1975, the last section of the dissertation reflects on valley farmers' experience in the post-imperial era. It highlights new tension and competition over access to resources and the impact the subjectivity of property entitlements had on aspects of land use, farm production, and environmental resource management in the eras of command economy and market liberalization.