especially in the South. With a mean land area of 2,075 ha per village, about three fourth of which (1,700 ha) cultivated individually, the per person land endowment amounts to only about 0.3 ha. Considering that only 6% of this land (virtually none of which is in the South) is irrigable, even a relatively ‘large’ endowment of 0.33 ha per person in Amhara, Oromia and Tigray will offer limited opportunities to generate marketable surplus. With only 0.15 ha per person, land is scarcer in the South than in China.<sup>6</sup> 90% of kebeles have communal and 61% have government land with 220 ha and 395 ha per kebele, respectively. With more than half of kebeles in the sample -from 93% in Amhara, 83% in Tigray, and 50% and 25% in the South and Oromia- having experienced one since 1991, land redistribution is still pervasive.<sup>7</sup>

# **2.4 Regional differences in the registration process**

Key characteristics of the regional regulations and progress as of end 2005 are summarized in table 2.<sup>8</sup> In the about 14,000 kebeles affected, the program is implemented in a very decentralized manner. Following a meeting describing the program, a land use and administration committee (LAC), to be elected by popular vote, assumes responsibility for implementation in a labor-intensive and field-based process. Regulations set the term of the LAC at 2 or 3 years and require inclusion of at least one female member. The extent to which written material is provided to LAC members varies; while Amhara and Oromia prepared posters or a book of instructions, the lack of a common language prevented this in the South.

The requirement to register plots in a public process with neighbors present in the field, rather than based on existing -and possibly incorrect- records increases transparency and reduces scope for errors or manipulation. At the same time, it implies a heavy workload for LAC members involved in the process.<sup>9</sup> To cope with this, registration activities are generally undertaken in the off-season when LAC members face few competing labor demands from agricultural activities. In Amhara, the process is supervised by the woreda survey team together with specifically formed ‘land administration teams’ comprising of students trained in relevant procedures. In other regions supervision is much less intense; in the South, the kebele level rural development agent is responsible for supervision while in Oromia the LAC acts more independently but can call on experts at the woreda level to provide advice if needed.

Once registration has been completed and results have been discussed in public -although there are few formal requirements for doing so- households receive a preliminary registration certificate identifying their holdings and, once all the information for a kebele has been entered into the registry book, an official

> 6 Although mean land endowments are, with 1.22 mu (0.08 ha) still smaller (Deininger _et al._ 2006b), the vast majority of such land is irrigable and capable of producing 2 or 3 crops a year compared to most Ethiopian lands that are rainfed.

> 7 As table 7 below illustrates, about 14% of respondents in our survey expect either an increase or a decrease of their holding size due to land redistribution, illustrating that certification has not completely eliminated concerns about administrative reallocation of land.

> 8 As the program is implemented in a decentralized fashion, it was not possible to obtain this information for a later date. We limit our discussion to the four regions (Amhara, Tigray, Oromia, and SNNPR) which contain the vast majority of Ethiopia’s population and agricultural production.

> 9 In group meetings, LAC members pointed to the need for them to stay overnight in distant subkebeles as one of the reasons for limited participation of females in the LAC. The massively parallel process adopted this increases the time available to complete registration in each kebele in a way that is still consistent with rapid progress overall.

7