Ploughing 

In the Amhara countryside, life revolves around ploughing and the capacity to plough. The ownership of oxen is the single biggest indicator of wealth and food donating bodies (DPPC, WFP/NGOs) all acknowledge this fact by using the ownership of oxen as a cut-off criteria for food aid.

Farmers who do not own oxen have a number of ways to ‘rent’ oxen. Each solution has it’s downsides and the options open to ox-less farmers often depend on factors such as availability of man power within the ox-less household, availability of other income sources etc.

The most common strategies for coping without oxen are: 

·     Sharecropping; farmers literally share the crops. An ox-less farmer will enter into an agreement with the owner of two oxen to borrow the animals for ploughing. Landowner and oxen-owner usually provide 50 % of the seed and labour each. The harvest is shared on a 50/50 basis, the straw is shared too.

·     Owners of one ox agree with another family who own one ox to lend eachother their ox to form an oxen team to plough the land of both families. This way neither family has to hand over any of the harvest.

·     Labour exchange; a team of oxen can sometimes be rented for a day in return for two days work by a person from the ox-less family. This is only possible when the ox-less family has man power available and has enough seed to plant their own land.

·     Cash/goods exchange; families who have cash or an exchangeable commodity available, such as cattle fodder (straw of hay) can ‘pay’ for the ploughing of their land. As grazing land is getting more scarce and depleted, this is an increasingly popular solution for poor farmers and oxen owners alike.

·     Hand cultivation; not very common in Amhara Region. Hoe cultivation is only practised by the very poor or those who cultivate very steep land. 

Communities are dependent on oxen for their wealth and the success of their harvest. If not enough oxen are available in a community, oxen will be sought from nearby communities, thus decreasing the wealth of the community as a whole.

Years of crisis have forced many farmers to sell their oxen, meaning not only a sharp decrease in their own wealth, but also disturbing the delicate balance of sharecrop and other arrangements within the community.  

Another knock-on effect of the gradual sale of cattle during huger periods is the fact that fewer calves are born. As oxen are more popular than cows because one ploughs only with oxen, therefore the cows are usually sold first. One can imagine that with the forced sell off of cows fewer and fewer breeders will be offering calves on the market. Any decrease in supply will inevitably lead to an increase in price.   

The farmers who have been able to keep their oxen have become increasingly wealthy (in village-level terms) through sharecropping with an increasing amount of families, lending money and buying sheep and goats at low prices during the hunger gap, etc. In general, a polarisation of wealth occurs, whereby fewer, wealthier families (still employing only a small amount of people) can exert a disproportionate amount of power over fellow villagers through their economic stranglehold on their neighbours. In other words, like in the western world: wealth creates wealth.