Effects of the current land tenure on augmenting household farmland access in South East Ethiopia

According to the current land policy of Ethiopia, rural households are legally allowed to access agricultural lands. Nonetheless, the difficulty of rural population in accessing farm-lands makes controversial authenticity of this land tenure to solve problems of household farmland access. This study aimed at assessing the effects of the current land tenure on augmenting household farmland access in Ethiopia. The study followed a mixed-methods research design to investigate the variables in the study. Thus, data were collected through a survey questionnaire, focus group discussion and interviews between May and June 2019. For data analysis, both descriptive and inferential statistics methods were employed. Consequently, study results indicated that the mean farmland size per household was 1.59 ha and government land allocation accounted for 41.9%. The farmland accesses of households headed by persons below 35 years were 13% and that of all female-headed households was 23.2%. It also showed that there were illegal farmland accesses via furtive farmland purchasing. On top of this, 63% of respondents perceived that the current land tenure was not a good rule. The regression analysis showed that the number of oxen, total crop production; annual income, education, and credit access were determinants of household farmland size. In conclusion, farmland scare areas in Ethiopia like Arsi zone have problems of deficient government land allocation, as well as unforeseen illicit farmland transactions. Given augmenting household farmland access, the study recommended that female-headed households have to be empowered and younger-headed households should be encouraged to enhancing their farmland accesses. The farming community should affirm to legal land regulations for maintaining their tenure arrangements. The local government should work according to land rules to liquidate illicit land markets. The national government should mitigate imbalanced farmland access by enforcing land rule acts such as land redistribution and reallocation with the consultation of the people. All level governments should strictly control alarming illegal changes of farmlands to urban areas by illicit land transactions.