Carol, I am not how this works but this is the link to the PDF link on project Muse:http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/african_studies_review/v055/55.3.adem.pdf

The Local Politics of Ethiopia’s Green Revolution in South Wollo

Teferi Abate Adem

Teferi Abate Adem is a research associate with Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University. He is the author of Land, Labour and Capital in the Social Organization of Farmers in Wollo (Addis Ababa University Press, 1998) and numerous articles on the subjects of household dynamics, rural development, and state‒local relations in highland Ethiopia. He was previously a visiting assistant professor in international development and social change (IDSC) at Clark University, a postdoctoral fellow in the Agrarian Studies program at Yale, and an assistant professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Addis Ababa University. E-mail: teferi.abate@yale.edu

Abstract: This article argues that Ethiopia’s agricultural extension program, which received more government funding and donor support than other similar programs in Africa, reinforced the rural presence and authoritarian powers of the ruling party while largely failing to improve smallholder agriculture. The principal reason for this outcome has to do with the systematic entanglement of the Green Revolution package delivery system with the immediate goal of guaranteeing the party’s political security. In one Amharic-speaking community that provided ethnographic information for this paper, overzealous party leaders rewarded supporters at the expense of imagined opponents. This distortion, coupled with a culturally embedded concept of success (defined as upward mobility), caused pervasive fear, insecurity, suspicion, and rivalry among farmers. Not surprisingly, this insecurity has a deleterious effect on hardworking farmers. The article suggests that any meaningful attempt at improving the program must recognize the centrality of politics, especially at the community and household levels, where parochial interests interface with cultural expectations.

Résumé: Cet article soutient que le programme d’extension agricole en Éthiopie, qui a reçu plus de financement gouvernemental et de donations que d’autres programmes similaires en Afrique, a renforcé la présence rurale et les pouvoirs autoritaires du parti en place tout en échouant sa mission d’amélioration de l’agriculture à petite échelle. Ce résultat est principalement dû à l’imbroglio systématique du système de livraison mis en place par la Révolution Verte, ayant pour objectif immédiat de garantir la sécurité politique du parti. Dans une communauté de langue amharique ayant fourni des données ethnographiques pour cet article, des chefs de parti trop zélés récompensaient leurs supporters au détriment d’opposants imaginaires. Cette distorsion en s’ajoutant au concept culturel de succès (défini comme la capacité de monter de grade) a engendré une peur envahissante ainsi que de l’insécurité, de la suspicion et de rivalité parmi les fermiers. Il n’est pas surprenant que cette insécurité ait eu des effets néfastes sur les fermiers déjà durs à la tâche. Cet article suggère que toute tentative d’amélioration du programme devra reconnaître la centralité du rôle que joue la scène politique, en particulier au niveau de la

communauté et des ménages, où les intérêts de chaque groupe se heurtent aux attentes culturelles.

This article discusses some of the political and cultural difficulties encountered by Ethiopia’s national agricultural extension program in their efforts to alleviate rural poverty and food insecurity. Officially launched in 1995 by the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Front (EPRDF), and still being implemented with vigor, this program seeks to extricate farmers from deepening poverty and chronic food insecurity. This goal was to be achieved by fostering the intensification of smallholder agriculture through the accelerated dissemination of “Green Revolution” technologies (such as chemical fertilizers, improved seeds, and pesticides), together with extension training and credit services. To this end, the program received a level of public funding and donor support that was unprecedented in Africa. Yet today, almost two decades later, food security remains a key challenge for millions of people, especially in rural areas.1

The article attributes this outcome to the systematic entanglement of the technology delivery system with measures intended to guarantee the political security of the ruling party. In one Amharic-speaking community that provided ethnographic information, local party cadres, backed by district officials, were zealous in their efforts to redefine local responses in political terms. Thus when a farmer “volunteered” to adopt Green Revolution packages, he was labeled “supporter,” which subsequently qualified him for political rewards, including recruitment into the ranks of the local party chapter. Party membership in turn opened doors for other opportunities such as employment in a rare salaried positions, nomination to a lucrative government position, better access to credit, and preferential treatment in terms of food aid and land distribution. By contrast, farmers who did not join the program risked political intimidation and repressive treatment.

The appropriation of development funds for the purpose of state coercion is not unique to the EPRDF government of Ethiopia. Many repressive regimes in Africa and elsewhere have pursued similar strategies to consolidate control, especially over hard-to-reach rural people.2 In the case of Ethiopia, however, the problem is exacerbated by a national political culture that survived both colonization and the forces of modernization. One salient aspect of this culture, which is directly relevant to the argument of this article, has been the total absence of credible community organizations for engaged famer participation in public life. Rural Ethiopians have long been ruled by means of a feudal-like patronage system based on a hierarchy of dyadic personal ties (see Levin 1965b). In this system, upward mobility for both elites and ordinary farmers depends not so much on success in agricultural cultivation, commerce, or the accumulation of capital, but rather on mastering a wide variety of political skills, including loyalty to superiors, military prowess, and the ability to win court cases and earn the favor of influential officials (see Hoben 1975, 1970). This cultural “logic” of rewarding politically savvy individuals at the expense of hard-working farmers has continued to the present day, despite successive regime changes.

This emphasis on culture and history is critical for understanding the kind of systematic entanglements that have hobbled the extension program. It differentiates my analysis from other studies that note possible distortions in donor-funded food aid and safety net programs but tend to blame the problems on technical “targeting errors”—the exclusion of intended beneficiaries and the inclusion of unintended ones (see Jayne et al. 2000; Devereux 2008). My explanation is also different from that of Human Rights Watch in its recent discussion of “how foreign aid money underwrites repression in Ethiopia.” 3 I seek to provide nuanced accounts of the local

context where politics interface with cultural expectations. My goal is to better understand gaps between stated program objectives and actual outcomes by conceptualizing the Green Revolution package delivery system not as the execution of clearly stated national guidelines, but as a political space where sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping meanings, assumptions, and interested are pursued by different actors. In doing so, I draw on insights from the anthropologist Donald Donham, who, writing on the experiences of the Maale of Southwest Ethiopia under the military regime, argues that “the ability of the new state to penetrate local communities cannot be explained only by the actions of a vanguard”; government agents were also “invited” by local actors to intervene in local conflicts on the side of one or another set of “parochial interests” (1999:159).

If my analysis is substantially correct, it follows that any meaningful attempt at improving the performance of the program must recognize the central role of politics. In the past, program evaluations focused on narrowly technical and managerial issues. During the program’s first five years (1995‒2000) of operation, for example, much of the blame for poor results was attributed to two factors: (1) the inadequate number and skill level of frontline extension agents and the need for training colleges (Kassa & Degnet 2004); and (2) the overly standardized technology packages, which did not adapt well to Ethiopia’s varied local agro-ecological conditions (GoE 2002). By the second five-year period (2001‒2005), the emphasis shifted to efficiency of factor markets (i.e., the efficiency of markets for key inputs such as fertilizer, seeds, and labor) and stakeholder relations (Berhenu et al. 2006; Ashworth 2005). According to one widely quoted report, for example, maize yield during this time tripled and quadrupled in some districts, thanks to the improved seeds and chemical fertilizers recommended by the program (Byerlee et al. 2007). Yet farmers did not benefit from this increase since the cost of these inputs, which were no longer subsidized by the government, was higher than the farm-to-gate price for the output. Similar issues surfaced during the program’s third five-year phase (2006‒2010). Recommended solutions included responding to evolving farmer needs through improved services in marketing and agricultural credit (Spielman et al. 2010).4 These reviews, while important for improving the program’s efficiency and viability, gave little attention to political and cultural factors.

The analysis in this article is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Amhara Region at four different times from 1993 to 2002. The longest fieldwork period lasted for nearly two years, from September 1996 to July 1998, when I lived among farmers in a community called Aba Selama, with occasional visits to the district capital, Kutaber, and my research base at Addis Ababa University.5 During this time, the adoption of Green Revolution technology, which had been initiated in 1995 with a few demonstration plots, expanded rapidly to involve 371 households. This timing provided me with a unique opportunity to observe and record the kinds of responses it received from different categories of farmers. My fieldwork also coincided with a tightly controlled decentralization process through which the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), one of the partners in the EPRDF coalition, became the ruling party of the newly established Amhara National Regional State (ANRS, hereafter Amhara Region). Over the course of my stay in Aba Selama I was intrigued by the degree to which the adoption rate of the package technologies was systematically entangled with the ANDM’s goal of consolidating its power and local presence by recruiting new members while repressing (mostly imagined) opponents.

I collected data from different sources by employing a combination of strategies. I was able to gain a general understanding of the program’s stated goals and its implementation

guidelines from government documents and official statements. Data on the program’s reported accomplishments in Aba Selama came from reports of the local Agriculture Development Office and discussions with the resident development agent (DA). For the more sensitive information relating to local party and interhousehold intrigues, I had to rely on my own observations of individuals and their relationships in a wide variety of situations, including public meetings and related governmental activities. My records on these issues were further enriched by information gained through casual conversation and informal interviews with people I happened to meet in various circumstances, including household visits, village tours, farmwork, and trips to Kutaber (which often with ended with an invitation for a drink in one of the tea houses). I also benefited from access to the files of a local ad hoc committee, established during the 1997 land redistribution, which was tasked “screening” the size, composition, and class background of each household unit. I obtained a copy of the resulting document, which included the political profile of all household heads as viewed by local ANDM leaders in 1998. I also benefited from access to tax rolls, food aid distribution lists, and land dispute cases at the local government office.

The next section highlights three salient aspects of the Ethiopian political culture that provide a conceptual framework for my discussion of the kind of political insecurities encountered by the extension program in the Amhara Region. The following section discusses some of the more recent regional politics that, while rooted within the broad historical and national context, led to the consolidation of ANDM as the ruling party of Amhara Region. Understanding this context is essential, since it reveals the nature of the patronage system and top-down approaches that subsequently shaped the implementation of the program in different parts of the region. The third section presents ethnographic evidence about the impact of the extension program on the residents of one community. The article ends with a conclusion asserting the centrality of politics in development intervention, especially at the household and community levels where parochial interests interface with cultural expectations.

The Political, Cultural, and Institutional Roots of Insecurity and Control in Ethiopia

The “logic” of trampling agriculture in favor of parochial political interests has deep institutional roots in Ethiopia’s national political culture. Emperor Haile Selassie reigned for nearly half a century through personal ties with a hierarchy of regional and local elites preoccupied with controlling land for the sake of their own political power rather than raising agricultural productivity by rewarding hard-working farmers. Likewise, the military regime, which dethroned the emperor in 1974, ruled for almost two decades through a unitary state structure concerned more with exerting central control than promoting human welfare or economic growth.6 The current government has sought to end this pattern by adopting a new constitution that restructured the country along a broadly decentralized, ethnically based federal system. Yet EPRDF leaders maintain tight control over the actual implementation of decentralization in ways that display continuity with authoritarian rule (see Donham 2002). In agriculture, the top-down approaches of the current regime are reflected starkly in the total absence of mechanisms for farmer participation or the opportunity to air local concerns. Like its predecessors, the regime has continued to erect what Dessalegn Rahmato calls “roadblocks to peasant empowerment” (2009:229).

In a number of publications that draw on extensive research and intimate knowledge of Ethiopia since the 1960s, the sociologist Donald Levine links this continuity to the combined effects of “three troublesome factors” (2007:10) that are deeply embedded in traditional

Ethiopian political culture. The first involves a deep-seated habit of suspicion and distrust in social relations, which blocks transparency and cooperation. Levine traces this tendency to a fundamental ambiguity and contradiction in the land tenure system of the Amhara-Tigray people, who played the dominant role in founding and expanding the Ethiopian empire (see also Donham 1986; Crummey 2000). In this system, each person was believed to have inalienable rights, called rist, to a share of the land first owned by any combination of his or her ancestors traced. In reality, however, the actual holdings of a person depended not on birthright but on his or her ability to activate that right. This was accomplished most successfully through the development of political and rhetorical skills, including knowing how and when to speak in councils of elders, mastering the procedures and nuances of litigation and dispute resolution, and cultivating instrumental ties with influential elites (see also Hoben 1973).

The second factor has to do with the prevalence of a masculine and militaristic ethos that prevents civil expressions of dissent. Levine attributes this to traditional Amhara-Tigray ideas about human nature, which he calls “Hobbesian” (1965a:250). Indeed, this point of view, which conceives of humanity as inherently unreliable and aggressive if not controlled by authority, was perhaps confirmed by Tigrayan informants who, speaking to the anthropologist Dan Bauer (1973:271), said that “if there were no district governor, men would kill one another” and “if there were no provincial governor, district governors would organize their people to fight one another.” Ironically, this rather favorable attitude toward governmental authorities does not guarantee security to incumbents. Instead, their power base and legitimacy depend on a continuous and subtle reassessment of changing personal circumstances and political alignments entailing intense political analysis of everyday conversation: making sense of whose fortunes are up or down, who is friends with whom, who is competing with whom, and so on.

Historically, part of this instability and competition rested on the low degree of differentiation between the social background of influential lords and ordinary farmers. In the words of the British Consul Walter Plowden (1868:137), who lived in Ethiopia from 1843 to 1860, “Each man considers himself as born to great destinies, despite temporary inequalities in wealth and social status.” It also has to do with a culturally embedded conception of relations with governmental authorities as contractual ties between subordinate and superordinate or patrons and clients, which shift and fluctuate. From the subordinate’s perspective, the duration of this contract depends on the calculation of self-interest in terms of real or imagined economic benefits and personal security. When these expectations are not met, the subordinate can cease to obey. At the same time, culturally valorized codes of masculinity suggest that a superordinate must defend his honor by enforcing obedience. The tension between these two expectations closes other options for expressing dissent; a disgruntled subordinate can either suppress dissent entirely, engage in outright rebellion, or express dissent in devious ways, including the subtle strategies that James Scott (1985) called “weapons of the weak.”

The last of the “three troublesome factors” is the strong proclivity of policymakers and ruling politicians across regimes to import foreign ideologies and development programs that portray farmers as tradition-bound, inefficient, and incapable of improving their lot without strong guidance from above. This has led to the continuity of widely discredited top-down approaches, even in programs, such as the agricultural extension program under discussion, that place a rather strong emphasis on “democracy” and “local participation.”7 In this article, I follow Levine’s broad analysis to argue that these “three troublesome factors” constitute the cultural and institutional context that has shaped the local consequences of EPRDF’s rural development and

political agenda. Collectively, these factors have reproduced a political logic that favors parochial interests at the expense of sound development strategies.

Power to Patrons of the Revolution: Consolidation of ANDM as Ruling Party of Amhara Region

The Amhara state of Ethiopia was officially established in 1995 when the new EPRDF-led regime enacted a constitution that divided Ethiopia into nine decentralized and ethnically based and regional states. On the surface, the laws and administrative practices of these decentralized states seem unencumbered by past practices. To this effect, EPRDF leaders and supporters often claim that old patterns of repression and insecurity have been eradicated by means of this devolution of state powers from the center to regions; more recently these powers have devolved even further from the region to district and local government levels. Nevertheless, one can observe a continuity of elements of the “three troublesome factors” discussed above. I will show this continuity by highlighting some of the tensions and unresolved contradictions I noted when ANDM became the ruling party in a region with many ethnically unmobilized areas.

The Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM) traces its origin to 1978 when a small group of guerilla fighters splintered away from a group calling itself the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Party (EPRP) to organize themselves as the Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Movement (EPDM). Following the ouster of the military regime in 1991, this group continued to consolidate its powers in Amhara Region to the point that currently it holds all the seats in the regional parliament. This monopoly came about not because of a lack of political opposition, but because of the instrumental ties ANDM leaders cultivated and maintained with like-minded politicians calling themselves “revolutionary democrats.” As in the past, relations among these new elites remain largely vertical and unstable, in the sense that the success of middle- and lower-level actors depends greatly on the support they get from powerful officials higher up in the political hierarchy.

At the apex of the new political hierarchy stands the top leadership of the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF), which, although hailing from a demographically minor ethnic group, dominates top leadership positions at the federal level and in the army. The very agenda of reconstituting Ethiopia along ethnic lines was spearheaded by these individuals who, in 1975, formed an insurgency group that later became TPLF. Beginning in 1989, the TPLF successfully expanded the areas under its control into many Amharic-speaking areas bordering Tigray.8 With this success, TPLF leaders were confronted with the dilemma of pursuing the retreating government army by deploying their ethnically homogenous fighters among the Amhara. This was a bit of a problem since, in the eyes of TPLF and like-minded ethnic politicians, the armed insurgency was blamed on the oppression by Amhara elites of non-Amhara peoples, including Tigray.

TPLF’s solution to this challenge was to recruit and co-opt like-minded ethnically based political movements from different parts of the country.9 In Amhara Region, the TPLF accomplished this by joining hands with the EPDM. This cooperation led to the formation of a broad political and military alliance called the Ethiopian Peoples’ Democratic Front (EPRDF), but TPLF continued to dominate both the senior leadership and the rank-and-file fighters.

After ousting the military regime in May 1991, the EPDM became the de facto ruling party in Amharic-speaking areas. It has been in power for almost twenty years, largely because of its affiliation with the powerful TPLF under the EPRDF umbrella. This association has given

EPDM leaders access to a preponderance of politically relevant resources including funding, communications, organizational arrangements, and control of the armed forces, all of which they use to silence dissident political parties and to incarcerate prominent leaders and civil society activists.

EPDM’s hostile reactions to opposition parties started early in the transition period, when the very meaning of “Amharaness” (i.e., being Amhara) was being redefined politically to make it fit into TPLF’s ethnic discourse. In comparison with the Tigrayans and many other small groups, the Amhara lacked a definitive group consciousness. Their language (Amharic) was (and still is) widely spoken throughout Ethiopia since it had been the national language for many years. Furthermore, urban-based Amhara elites identified themselves closely with a “multi-ethnic Ethiopia” because a majority of them came from mixed ethnic families that had evolved in the course of empire-building and population movement. Likewise, Amhara villagers for the most part identified themselves with multiple markers in different contexts. Some went by the name of their home province and/or subprovince. Others (e.g., among the religiously and ethnically heterogeneous Wollo) went by their religious affiliation while also recognizing place-based identities. Still others emphasized kinship ties with notable individuals and groups. For all these reasons, many Amharic-speaking people appeared ethnically unmobilized. This put them at odds with the TPLF, which espoused ethnicity “as an absolute value” for identifying all Ethiopians (Levine 2007:7).

The reluctance of Amharic-speaking peoples to accept the ethnic label was also a symptom of another transitional tension among Ethiopia’s new leaders, including many in the EPRDF coalition, who associated the Amhara with the domination of ethnic minorities by former feudal lords and gun-bearing followers. They viewed them as the enemy rather than possible partners in the liberation struggle. For this reason, there was no single political movement early in the transition period that claimed to represent the Amhara people. EPRDF’s solution was to redefine the Amhara to make them an acceptable constituent in the ethically based federal system. A crucial event in this redefinition process occurred in November 1991, when the EPDM invited hundreds of carefully selected “Amhara” men and women to what it called “The First National Conference of Oppressed Amhara People.” Held in Bahr Dar, which later became the capital of the regional state, the conference adopted a ten-point resolution concerning political representation and the future of the Amhara people (EPDM 1992). The most important of these points included the confirmation of EPDM, which had operated in the region during the civil war, as the vanguard of “oppressed Amhara people’s class and national interests.” The resolution also called upon members of formerly oppressed ethnic groups to affirm that the Amhara masses were also oppressed, albeit by their Amhara fellows. The conference also affirmed its support for the building of a new Ethiopia in which the equality of ethnic groups would be guaranteed. This effort of reinventing the Amhara as a homogonous ethnic group reached a climax in 1994 when the EPDM itself decided to eliminate the phrase “Ethiopia Peoples” from its name and become the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM).

Thus the ANDM declared itself the sole representative of the Amhara people. But, informed by the party’s Marxist-Leninist doctrine, this representation was (and still is) officially partisan. It claims to embrace “all oppressed Amhara people” while excluding the “elites” that have long been associated with the old political system (EPRDF 1995). This polarization has portrayed political options in the region in terms of a fierce class war between the “oppressed masses,” on one hand, and a few elites on the other. This opposition has at times been very

intense, preventing constructive civil discussion on pressing public issues and flagship government programs, including the agricultural extension program.

Package Delivery as Space for Extending State Powers: Evidences from South Wollo, 1995-2002

The officially stated goal of the agricultural extension program tells only one part of the story—namely, the expectations of higher-level government officials as informed, supposedly, by the expertise of knowledgeable agricultural scientists. But only a local focus, at the community and household levels, captures how the program has effected farmers in their daily lives.10

Aba Selama, located in Kutaber district of South Wollo administrative zone, is one of several local governments in Amhara region.11 As of mid-1997, it had a total of 6,294 inhabitants and 1,643 household units called bétäsäb (Amharic: people of the house).12 As in the rest of highland Ethiopia, these households are the basic units of social and agro-economic production. A majority of the households earn their living from agriculture, which typically involves the cultivation of grain and legumes by oxen-drawn plow, and the rearing of small and large ruminants.13 Living at the center of one of Ethiopia’s drought-prone regions, many Aba Selamans suffer from chronic food insecurity.14 According to a local government official, about one-half of the population requires relief assistant in any given year, irrespective of climatic shocks, and the entire population appears in emergency rolls in crisis years.15 This reflects the degree to which externally provided resources, whether humanitarian assistance or government safety net programs, have become significant in the lives of households. It also suggests that a person’s success as a head of a household requires not only hard work in farming but also political competence in the form of cultivating instrumental ties with local government agents responsible for redistributing resources.

In October 1996, when I began ethnographic fieldwork in Aba Selama, the agricultural extension program was already in its second farming season. But its coverage was limited to the plots of a few “volunteer” farmers selected by the resident extension agent (DA). The DA himself was a party member, with a fresh diploma in “Agricultural Development” from one of the junior agricultural colleges newly built with development aid.16 Because of the requirement that he serve the party’s political interests, the DA selected “volunteer” model farmers who will praise the Green Revolution packages even when the actual results may not be entirely positive.17

The DA also has the job of choosing plots whose location and soils are considered to provide maximum chances for success. Officially called “demonstration plots” (Amharic: serto masaya), these plots are intended to showcase the benefits of the packages (chemical fertilizers, improved seeds, and some crop protecting chemicals) when they are applied as recommended by the program.

A few weeks later, as the harvest season approached, the nearly ripe crops (mostly wheat, barley, and sorghum) on these demonstration plots promised an unusually excellent yield. This raised the hopes and spirits of villagers. This good start was also encouraging to EPRDF leaders back at the district and high up in the hierarchy who, pressed by mounting international pressure, seemed ready to replace (or give the appearance of replacing) their long-held Marxist-Leninist ideology with a pragmatic approach more acceptable to donors and humanitarian organizations.18

Parallel to this hope in the agricultural landscape, however, the residents of Aba Selama began to notice a sense of direction in the local political landscape, which looked as if it was

moving toward a return to the discredited top-down approach of the previous regimes. As it became all too clear over the ensuing years, the promised participatory (or “revolutionary,” in EPRDF parlance) democracy was becoming illusive.

Ironically, the reversal was greatly facilitated by the package delivery system of the new program, which was rhetorically named “Participatory Demonstration and Training Extension System” (PADETES). This reversal became apparent beginning in the fall of 1996 when the Amhara regional government scaled up program in the context of its new five-year (1996‒2000) development plan. Specifically, this expansion plan called for increasing the number of farmers adopting Green Revolution packages from 2.5 percent to 39 percent by the end of the plan year in 2000. By doing so, the party hoped to increase the amount of food produced in the region from the approximately 32.7 million quintals at which it stood in 1994‒95 to 56.5 million quintals in 2000 (ANRS 1996:43).

With this target in mind, the ruling party launched an intensive campaign that culminated in the imposition of annual quota targets on each of the region’s ten administrative “zones.” Each zone, for its part, divided the quota share among its constituent districts (woreda), which in turn divided it according to local administrative units (kebelle). In Aba Selama, the Executive Committee of the local government spearheaded this campaign.19 About ten days before the start, all nine members of this committee were summoned to a five-day-long “planning and public mobilization seminar” at the district capital. In addition to endorsing the district’s quota share, the seminar established the number of farmers who needed to adopt the package technologies in each kebelle if the district was to meet that target. As per PADETES guidelines, local officials had to initiate their farmer recruitment by convening village-level meetings, which were ironically named “local planning meetings.”

Not surprisingly, in these meetings, some of which I attended, officials of the local government showed strong support for the kebelle’s quota share. But , as it became clear at later stages of implementation, the officials were motivated more by self-interest than by their convictions about the benefits of the Green Revolution. They were concerned more with the political consequences of not fulfilling the required quota than with its economic outcome, and they also feared that questioning such a substantive party initiative would be equated with insubordination. Local officials also anticipated that success would heighten their power as local representatives of the regional party government.

Household-level interests also started to surface. The quota target received strong support from a group of ambitious young men and women who envisioned better chances for themselves if they supported party initiatives. Some of these were male heads of newly established, and in most cases landless, households. The remainder were unmarried young men and divorcees who lived with their parents. The group also included a fair number of demobilized soldiers as well as members of displaced families, mostly famine victims who had previously been resettled elsewhere. A majority of these farmers had some schooling, but their aspiration to establish their own households was frustrated by lack of employment and land. By contrast, heads of well-established households, who also represented the “better off” group in the community, displayed much apprehension. They worried that the technology packages might not work as promised. They also worried about the return to the much discredited top-down campaign approach, which brought back memories of the failed socialist collectives and forced resettlement projects of the previous regime.

For senior and district-level party leaders, who had a good understanding of these dynamics from their experience in other Amhara communities during the insurgency, this

configuration made political sense. It fitted their rather simplistic but politically potent classification of Amhara people into polarized classes. The interests of the youth and the landless became greatly aligned with what the party called “oppressed Amhara,” while the concerns of the economically better off became those of the “oppressor” and the “chauvinist.” With this reconfiguration, the ruling party found the “oppressed Amhara” it claimed to represent. By the same token, well-off farmers and seniors became “the enemy.”

This politically charged social cleavage was reinforced by the land policy that has been in place since 1975. As the centerpiece of the previous regime’s socialist programs, the policy emphasized a reduction in household-level landholding inequalities by seasonally redistributing land among all residents of each locality.20 With changes in the demographic composition of households, this policy generated intergenerational conflicts (see Teferi 1994); when land was redivided, sons and daughters were able to marry and establish households without being allocated land by parents, thus weakening the authority of their elders. However, when there was no redivision, the young remained subordinate to their elders, a situation that, along with related unmet aspirations of the youth, provided the regional party state with demands for local intervention.

In 1997 the regime temporarily resolved this tension in parts of Amhara region, including Aba Selama, by redistributing land in favor of the young and the unmarried.21 This measure enabled the ruling ANDM to expand its power base and political mobilization in parts of Amhara Region where it had not recruited local members during the civil war. Over the years since then, however, the regime has officially stopped redividing land, leaving unresolved the tensions between those who received land at the last redivision and those who came of age later. As a consequence, the young farmers continued to be uncritical supporters of government intervention programs, with the hope of gaining a political edge and eventually receiving land.

Green Revolution adoption in Aba Selama reached 371 households by the 1998 harvest season.22 As per another key guideline of PADETES, which emphasized “farmer‒farmer learning,” all the participant farmers in the kebelle were organized into twenty-one teams. Each team consisted of one or two master farmers called “core demonstrators,” three or four juniors called “copy demonstrators,” and a dozen or so newly enlisted participants called “followers.” On the surface, this hierarchy seemed designed to accelerate package dissemination by concentrating on “progressive” farmers whose experiences could produce a multiplier effect on others. Up close, however, one would note the sorts of cleavages and partisanships discussed above. The “core demonstrators” were invariably young farmers who were also “seniors” in the membership rank of the local party branch. Likewise, those in the “copy” and “follower” positions were drawn, respectively, from the party’s junior and candidate members.23

Consequently, the actual package delivery system was quite different from the kind of “model farmer” approach previously used in India and elsewhere. For example, the core demonstrators were routinely engaged in a wide variety of partisan political activities including collecting membership dues, circulating instructions from the local party chapter, checking on the political discipline of members, and so on. As village-level agents of the party, the core demonstrators were also responsible for providing their superiors at the district party office with regular updates on the extension program and related governmental activities. While juggling these two roles, some of these farmers appeared more concerned with advancing their own political careers than demonstrating the benefits of adopting Green Revolution technologies. This was especially true of young, zealous core demonstrators who, having completed high school education, anticipated opportunities for upward mobility in political careers instead of farming.24

Core demonstrators also supervised the planting, weeding, and harvesting schedule of their “copy” demonstrators in order to ensure that the farmers complied with the packages’ instructions. Not surprisingly, some core demonstrator farmers and local officials used this opportunity to enhance their personal standing by discriminating between adversaries and friends. On one occasion, for instance, a man who lived in the lower section of the Aba Selama escarpment was involved in a serious conflict with a core demonstrator about the harvesting of his sorghum; the crop has been planted on a marginal plot that was vulnerable to birds and unattended cattle, and the farmer wanted to harvest the grain as soon as it began to ripen. But the core demonstrator wanted him to wait three more weeks, arguing that the grain was not yet fully ripe. When the farmer harvested the sorghum without permission, he was reportedly threatened with punishment for defying “a government regulation.”25

The basic implementation approach was in fact at odds with the farmer’s logic, which turned out to be better adapted to plot-level variations in landscape, soil type, and weather circumstances. However, the approach was well suited to the party’s logic of increasing its local presence by playing off one faction against another. Official data on party membership was a sensitive matter to ask about in the context of my fieldwork. In private conversation with a local party leader, I was told that as of June 1998 ANDM had a total of 170 registered members in Aba Selama. These included twenty-five individuals who had received formal training in mass mobilization and related party work in order to be appointed as “farmer cadres.” It also included ninety-eight of the one hundred incumbent councilors of the local government. To my surprise, this estimate coincided with an official party document from 1996 that I came across in another context. Entitled “Plan of ANDM’s South Wollo Zone Branch for the Year 1996/97,” this document begins by stating ANDM’s past accomplishments in the zone, which included enrolling one-quarter to one-third of all adults in each rural kebelle (i.e., the smallest administrative unit) into the ranks of its membership. It also provides a justification for the party’s focus on the “the rural mass” and “lower class government workers” as opposed to “urban-based bureaucrats,” “high income government workers” and “merchants” whose political interests run counter to ANDM’s commitment to the causes of “poor farmers” (ANDM 1996:4‒5).

When I returned to Aba Selama for brief fieldwork in April 2002, the local government, under the supervision of district officials from Kutaber, was in the initial stages of implementing EPRDF’s second five-year plan, spanning the years 2001‒5. In this plan, which was meant to reduce poverty, especially in rural areas, the regional government once again placed the agricultural extension program at center stage. Parallel to this, the plan also called for solving longstanding governance issues by devolving the powers of the regional government, which were greatly increased by the 1995 constitution, down to the district and local levels.

During that visit I was struck by one immediate outcome of the devolution rhetoric: a clear contradiction between the fiscal and the political sides of the decentralization process (see Teferi 2004). On the fiscal side, district and local officials benefited from the availability of more funds from government and international donors that were earmarked for them. They also enjoyed greatly increased discretionary power in terms of their spending of resources, and they now commanded more resources to finance social services and public programs. Thus the worth of their power was heightened in the eyes of ordinary citizens. On the political side, however, these officials had become highly dependent on the favors of the ruling party, which oversaw their operations through a hierarchy of trusted, and yet centrally controlled, cadres strategically deployed at each government level. The cumulative effect of this upwardly skewed

accountability, together with the blurred distinction between party and state, had become a return to top-down approaches.

Conclusion: Participation with Resentment?

Ethiopia’s agricultural extension program started out as a sound strategy that reflected an adroit assessment of the country’s long struggle with deepening rural poverty and chronic food insecurity. It promised to address these problems by unleashing the potential of millions of smallholder farmers who had been stymied by the socialist agricultural cooperatives and state farms of the previous regime. It also promised to empower farmers by reversing the top-down approaches of previous regimes. To this effect, the program represented a rare opportunity for real change in Ethiopia’s agrarian history. Yet these promises remain elusive. For the farmers of South Wollo, who endured the worst effects of frequent famines, the program has become yet another perverse government intervention. For Ethiopia as a nation, which since the 1950s has witnessed what Levine calls “mishandled structural openings,” and “missed opportunities” since the 1950s (Levine 2007: 2page; date:page), this outcome suggests that the program is yet another failure.26

Instead of improving smallholder agriculture, the program has reinforced the ruling party’s rural presence and authoritarian powers in Amhara region, as well as a dominant political culture characterized by suspicion and distrust in social relations, masculine and a militaristicy ethos, and a tendency to import foreign ideologies (see Levine 1965a, 1997; Hoben 1970; Weisleder 1963). For rural development and agriculture, one lasting legacy of this culture has been a concept of success as upward mobility in which an agriculturalist’s political skills in managing vertical ties with influential authorities surpass his or her ability to accumulate wealth through crop cultivation, commerce, and other gainful pursuits.

This cultural logic fits well with EPRDF’s logic of entangling the local implementation of the extension program with the immediate exigency of its political security. In doing so, the party has received unexpected help from individuals who, in the context of local conflicts and social cleavages, seek government support. Because of these internal dynamics, the first group of farmers who “volunteered” to adopt the packages in Amhara region were ambitious youth who envisioned opportunities for upward social and political mobility by cultivating patron‒client ties with party functionaries. By adopting the packages, these young farmers sought to score political gains in the form of party-appointed salaried jobs and access to government-controlled resources such as land, food aid, and cash credit.

Understanding these culturally informed concerns and strategies is essential for explaining why several farmers continued to adopt the technology packages regardless of their economic costs and benefits. In the absence of local mechanisms for democratic participation and engaged collective action, this opportunism and favoritism had the deleterious effect of distorting stated extension objectives and approaches. The persistence of these issues suggests that any meaningful attempt at improving the program must recognize the centrality of politics in its implementation.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented in the panel “Transitions without Transformations? Perspectives on Ethiopia’s Last Two Decades” at the 53rd Annual Meetings of African Studies Association held in San Francisco, November 18‒21, 2010. I benefited from comments by the discussant, Andrew Apter, and exchanges with fellow panelists. My dissertation research in Amhara Region, which lasted from September 1996 to July 1998, was supported by generous grants from the Christian Michelson Institute (1996) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1997‒98). The Institute of Development Research (IDR) at Addis Ababa University financially supported my brief return visit to South Wollo in spring 2002. I am grateful to my mentor, Allan Hoben, for continuous guidance and inspiration. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive advice and helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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Notes

1. According to Dessalegn Rahmato, one of the most recognized authorities on the dynamics of poverty in Ethiopia, agricultural productivity in Ethiopia has declined continuously since the 1950s. His works show a depressing pattern of structural shifts from chronic poverty to extreme destitution, from a viable smallholder agriculture to shrinking “micro-agriculture,” and from a diversified “farm economy” to consumption-oriented “food economy” (see Dessalegn 2009, 2003, 1997, 1993, 1996, and 1986). Not surprisingly, official government data record slight improvement in recent years because of the extension program. At the beginning of the current five-year (2010‒14) “Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP), for example, the number of “food insecure” Ethiopians, which stood at 28.2 percent (well over 21 million individuals) in 2002, had declined to 21.2 percent of the population (i.e., over 16 million Ethiopians) in 2010 (GoE 2010). Official reports tend to exaggerate success. But this figure itself shows that household food sufficiency in Ethiopia remains elusive. 2. The diversion of development funds, including foreign aid, for use as a general government resource is well documented in many studies. For a more recent review of this literature and empirical evidence on the political consequences of U.S. bilateral foreign aid in Africa and elsewhere, see Trisko (2011). 3. According to Human Rights Watch, development aid to Ethiopia “flows through, and directly supports, a virtual one-party state with a deplorable human rights record. Ethiopia’s practices include jailing and silencing critics and media, enacting laws to undermine human rights activity, and hobbling the political opposition (HRW 2010:4). Unsurprisingly, this report was strongly refuted not only but the Ethiopian government but also by its major Western donors. The latter claim that the programs they fund are supported by “relatively robust accountability systems” (DAG 2010:iv). 4. A collection of recent high-profile diagnostic reports conducted by the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) thematically divided these issues into the following three groups: (1) input markets (i.e., seed system, irrigation, and soil fertility); (2) output markets (maize, livestock, and pulses); and (3) agricultural finance (credit provisions, investment, and savings). The reports are available at http://ethiopianagriculture.wordpress.com/diagnostic-reports/. 5. The remaining three were (1) a three-month (1993) research project on household dynamics in Tewa (South Wollo); (2) a one-month research project on indigenous natural resource management practices in North Shewa ; and (3) a brief visit to Aba Selama and Tewa (both in South Wollo) in 2002. See Teferi (1993, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2004). 6. See especially Crummey (2000) and Donham (1986). Other important works on change and continuity in state–local society relations in successive Ethiopian regimes include Clapham (1988, 2002), Dessalegn (1986, 2009), Hoben (1996), and Markakis (2011). 7. Other Ethiopian programs widely discredited for their top-down approaches include the preceding regime’s “villagization” plan (i.e, grouping isolated homesteads into government planned villages) and “collectivization” (i.e, socialist cooperatives) programs. Despite the extension program’s rhetorical emphasis on farmer participation and democracy (since participants are suppose to be volunteers), its actual implementation shows continuity of elements of this top-down approach. 8. Important sources on the history of TPLF include Young (1998) and Gebru (2009). 9. For an excellent discussion of the ways TPLF leaders strategically recruited and co-opted political supporters from the ranks of elites in each of the many ethnic groups constituting what they later carved out as the “Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region” (SNNPR), see Data D. Barata (2010) and Vaughan (2006).

10. While the argument presented in the following pages draws on ethnographic data collected before the 2005 parliamentary election, it seems equally applicable as an explanation for what became of the extension program afterward. Commentaries on the Ethiopian political scene since then suggest that the EPRDF has continued to divert program resources for consolidating its powers to the point of achieving monopoly in all districts and localities (See, for example, Lefort 2010). For Aba Selama, confirmation of this result has to wait for a follow-up research. 11. The Amhara Region is internally organized into four administrative levels: from the top these are the region (kilil), zones (often corresponding to former provinces), district (woreda) and local (kebelle). As of 2002, there were thirteen zones (10 regular and 3 “special”) and 113 districts. Each district was further divided into ten to fifteen kebelle. By 2008, the number of districts in the Region increased to 150 (see Yilmaz & Venugopa 2008:4).12. Demographic data were obtained from the local government office in June 1997.13. For the agricultural history of Ethiopia, see McCann (1995).14. For the geographical distribution of famine and chronic food insecurity in Ethiopia, see Webb and Braun (1994:21‒22). 15. Interview with Aragaw Muhei, Executive Committee member of the Aba Sälama local government, May 14, 2002. 16. This information was obtained from the young man himself later in the course of my fieldwork, despite the obviously sensitive and secretive nature of party membership. 17. As discussed in Teferi (2000), most of the young men and women working in this capacity are well-intentioned experts who want to improve the lives of farmers. But they all face a career dilemma. Because most of them received this appointment on account of party membership, their superiors at the district government want them to pay back to the party in every way possible. In most cases, this expectation includes pleasing party superiors by compromising one’s own ethics as an expert. This distortion took many forms, depending on what the superiors wanted. At times, data could be “cooked” to inflate performance. At other times, farmers could be coerced into meeting party-imposed quota targets. For a discussion of similar dilemmas faced by DAs elsewhere in Ethiopia, see Kassa and Degnet (2004). For the most recent period, see Pankhurst and Bevan (2011). 18. Detailed discussion of this story here would be a diversion, but it is worth noting that the program evolved from a pilot program funded by Sasakawa-Global 2000. The founders of this program, Ryoichi Sasakawa and President Jimmy Carter, were said to have personally witnessed Ethiopia’s suffering from devastating famines and violent civil war. Sasakawa visited some of those who suffered the most from the 1984‒85 famine, together with one of the architects of the Green Revolution (Norman Borlaug). Likewise, President Carter became intimately involved with Ethiopian issues beginning in the late 1980s when he was mediating a series of failed peace talks between the rebel EPRDF and the military regime. For a brief history of SG-2000 in Ethiopia, see Takele (1997). 19. During this time, the Executive Committee of the local (kebelle) government of Aba Selama consisted of nine men. The number was reduced to five in 2001. For detailed information on the workings of the local government, see Teferi (2000:173‒203). 20. For analysis of the military regime’s land policy, see Dessalegn (1984, 1993, 1994), Hoben (1996), and Pausewang (1983). 21. For discussion of the 1997 land redistribution in North Shawa, see Ege (2000, 1997). For Gojjam, see Yigremew (1997).

22. This was a staggering number for a political party which had no officially registered members until 1994. It represented over 36 percent of the 1,023 household heads listed in the local government’s official tax roll for 1998. See Teferi (2000:281). 23. Local party members, I was told, were organized into four hierarchical groups: kor (registered supporters), echu (candidate), abal (members), and arso adär cadre (farmer or primary-level cadres). Party rule required each person to pass through this hierarchy. A member could also be purged and demoted for a wide variety of reasons. 24. For evidence of similar processes in Tigray, see Segers et al. (2008). 25. Farmers who dared to question government orders were politically intimidated by local party agents who would call them by such negative labels as “anti-development,” “anti-people,” “chauvinist Amhara,” etc. 26. “Missed opportunities” and “structural openings” are terms used by Levine in explaining Ethiopia’s difficulties in modernizing its political system. He identifies the following five unique, but mishandled, opportunities in Ethiopia’s recent history: “(1) the abortive coup of December 1960; (2) the ferment of 1974; (3) the regime change of 1991; (4) the Eritrean war of 1998; and (5) the May 2005 national election” (Levine 2007:6).