The Ethiopian Way to Agrarian Transformation: Agricultural Clusters in South Wollo

This work deals with the strategies and processes of agrarian transformation currently unfolding in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is currently achieving some of the most impressive records of economic growth, through a strategy of agricultural-development-led industrialization. The strategy is expected to help the country to achieve a middle-income country status in the near future, to bring about a structural transformation of the economy, to eradicate poverty and food insecurity. A major process of social and economic transformation is pursued of the country’s agrarian base, which is still mainly made up by the smallholding peasantry. Therefore, the analysis of the current agrarian transformation process at issue here, deals primarily with the process of social and economic change envisaged by the developmental state for the peasantry. The analysis fits into a longstanding theoretical debate on the role of small-scale farming production in development and agrarian transition. Lately, the debate has focused on the combined leverage of a multidimensional range of global and local factors, which is fostering a rapid change in social and economic production, reproduction and exchange relations. In this context, the mainstream approach to rural and agricultural development widely adopted by developing countries has sought to integrate smallholding farmers in outward-oriented and inter-sectoral value chains. Along the same line, lately the Government of Ethiopia has started to implement a cluster-based approach to agricultural development, which holds an impressive potential for transformation. By providing an innovative contribution to the definition of the Ethiopian way to agrarian transformation, the empirical-based analysis of the implementation process of agricultural clusters in South Wollo hereby proposed, provides insights into: the peasantry’s changing role in fostering development and structural transformation, the leverage of historical legacies and international influences on the adoption and implementation of the strategy, the developmental state and state-peasant relation.