A study case on coffee (Coffea arabica): Limu Coffe - IRD

In 1891, Limu-Ennarea kingdom also felt under Amhara control. Menelik II used to
settle conquered territories installing an Amhara governor and delegations of officers and
soldiers as written before. The latter were given estates all around the conquered kingdoms.
After, during the Haile Selassie I regime (1930-1974), land masters became landowners
beginning to pay annual taxes to the Emperor (fifty cents per fetchassa). In this way, some
owners began to sell their land to merchants or other growers. When the owner couldn’t pay
the annual taxes to the emperor, he was expropriated and his possessions given to Haile
Selassie I circle of close people. The number of peasants increased because of estates
divisions and the sale of lands. Anyway, relations between landowners and tenants remained
the same. Amhara emperors tried to abolish slavery in order to satisfy European will and to be
member of the former United Nations Organization. But this was accomplished by Italian
intrusion up to 1936. And freed slaves became tenants on their landowners’ former estate or
kept their own land as owners. After Italian invasion, Haile Selassie I turned back to Ethiopia
and promised to give a land to each Ethiopian and changes on land taxation. He didn’t and
respected deputies and senators’ pressure, the bulk of them being landowners.
Foreign pressure, capitalism and centralisation of power killed the feudal plant. Land
had to be freed from the remaining feudal constraints to enter the market as a commodity. In
1966, gult was finally eliminated. Nevertheless the gultegnas of the southern provinces were
claiming large portions of their former gult as personal property. In 1967, an agricultural
income tax replaced the former tithe. The landowning class was to be taxed on its income
(including rent) for the first time. While the retreat of feudalism left the northern peasant
essentially a smallholder, the majority of southern peasants became landless proletarians. In
the 1960’s the capitalist advance of commercial agriculture exposed tenants to precariousness.
Indeed as soon as a district was opened up through improved infrastructure, credit and other
facilities, landlords began to evict their tenants in order to undertake cultivation themselves or
to rent the land to outside entrepreneurs who moved in with machinery. Kaffa coffee was
cultivated in owner-tended plantations and was also picked in its “wild” state in the estates of
absentee landlords. The most dynamic capitalist agricultural enterprise was a neo-colonial
plantation system with foreign ownership and management. Its growth required the
transformation of the poor peasantry into a rural proletariat.
In 1974, a revolution overthrew Haile Selassie I and feudal rules then felt into military
hands which committee was known as DERG, lead by Colonel Haile Maryam Mengistu. This
52