Land Rights, Urban Agriculture and the Right to Food: The Case of Addis Ababa

Abstract

This paper argues that the link between access to land and food security is ill-addressed in the context of urban and peri-urban areas of Ethiopia. It states that most cities and towns in Ethiopia are located on arable fertile farmland. Their expansion, which is inevitable as the urban population increases, leads to the conversion of most farmland surrounding them to urban land, which would lead to a shrinking of fertile farmland and displacement of peri-urban peasants who used to produce food crops such as teff, wheat, and barley not only for family consumption but for urban market supply. This, in turn, creates a food availability decline on markets which causes an increase in food price. Urban planning in Ethiopia also seems to neglect the possibility of promoting urban farming. The paper analyses laws and policies governing the rights to food and urban land focusing on the integration of urban and peri-urban development planning and assesses whether the new land expropriation law pays adequate attention to the livelihoods and food security of peri-urban smallholders, examining whether urban planning takes into account urban farming and effects of urban land use planning on fertile farmlands around Addis Ababa and towns surrounding it. It finds that Ethiopia’s 2005 land expropriation law, which paid little heed to the right to just compensation, resettlement, and rehabilitation of farmers displaced as a result of urbanization, has been replaced by a new expropriation law in 2019; but the implication of this new law for food security of peri-urban farmers is yet to be seen.