In From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia, James McCann engages an interdisciplinary perspective to uncover the historical background to the persistence of famine in the northeast region of Ethiopia. His study focuses on the northern Wallo region, an area that was incorporated into Haile Selassie's modern state system and now one of the most devastated portions of the country. The history of northern Wallo and its position within the modern Ethiopian state is presented through an examination of the circumstances in which its rural population lived, farmed, and adapted to a changing physical environment and political economy between 1900 and 1935. This period also coincided with the most critical years of colonial Africa's incorporation into the world economy. McCann's employment of new field data calls into question previous studies of Africa, which have frequently identified ecological stress and famine as simply the products of capitalist development. What accounts for rural Ethiopia's vulnerability to famine, when it boasts one of Africa's most efficient traditional agricultural systems? To what extent have northern Ethiopian patterns of property, marriage, and ideology resisted or contributed to the overall impoverishment of the rural economy? The answers to these questions are found in McCann's careful examination of the historical, geographic, ecological, and demographic characteristics that have affected northern Wallo's systems of production. This comprehensive description of northern Wallo's historical experience is also instructive in terms of the nature of social change and continuity, and the persistence of famine throughout northern Ethiopia. From Poverty to Famine in Northeastern Ethiopia

For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers. This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the world. People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys, photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann’s five years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth, urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.

Historians and scholars of Ethiopia have long struggled to understand the "Ethiopian Paradox": that is, how could Africa's most productive food production system, which sustained an extraordinary imperial culture over two millennia, also be home to periodic, gut-wrenching famine and rural poverty? Ethiopia in the late twentieth century has surpassed earlier icons of famine: China, India, Armenia, and Biafra. And yet, ironically, Ethiopia's highland culture also generated, and eventually exported, the iconic cuisine served in Ethiopian restaurants throughout the developed world, and in large cities in Africa itself. Donald Crummey argues that in the face of increasing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. In the process they have developed effective strategies for managing their environment--strategies too often ignored by conservation projects.

What do peasants do in the face of severe food crisis and ecological stress, and how do they manage to survive on their own? This study revolves around a case study conducted by the author in the awraja (district) in the Ambassel Wollo province in northeastern Ethiopia. This is in the region that was hit hardest by the 1984-85 famine, which Rahmato calls "the worst tragedy rural Ethiopia had ever experienced". The author also critically examines other literature on famine response. The focus of this study is on what happens before famine comes, and how the peasants prepare for it. From a wealth of evidence, the author concludes that the seeds of famine are sown during the years of recovery.

This book is the inside story of the Ethiopian resettlement programme, carried out in the mid-1980s by the Ethiopian government amid fierce international controversy. It relies on the views of the settlers themselves, and is based on an in-depth study carried out by an anthropologist who lived in a resettlement village. Alula Pankhurst dispels current myths about resettlement; while showing the importance of famine and coercion, he highlights social factors in the mosaic of settlers' motivation. He documents the attempt to institute a collectivist model of agriculture and analyses the reasons for its failure. He also examines the effects of Ethiopia's recent economic liberalisation and the impact of aid agencies. The book addresses an increasing Third World phenomenon: state organised relocation. It is a major contribution to the literature on mass-migration and on refugees. By focusing on the interaction between people and the state, it also reassesses a fundamental development problem: the gulf between local and national priorities. Accessible and thought-provoking, Resettlement and famine in Ethiopia will be of interest to anthropologists, students of development studies, and practitioners, and all those concerned by famine, forced migration and socialist attempts to transform societies.

Concepts and research approach; A record of drought and famine in Ethiopia; Household responses to drought and famine; Agricultural constraints: conflict, policy, and drought; Prices and markets during famine; Public intervention during famine.

A historical study of the relationship between political and environmental change in Tanzania's northeastern lowlands, an impoverished region that has been afflicted by severe food shortages throughout the twentieth century.