When Cities Swallow Farms: Ethiopian Farmers Reveal What Fair Compensation Really Takes

When a city grows, it does not grow upward first — it grows outward, over the farmland that once fed it. In the highlands of Northwest Ethiopia, that expansion has been swallowing plots that families worked for generations, and a new study from Debre Markos University offers one of the most detailed statistical portraits yet of what happens to the people standing in the path of the bulldozers. The research, published in Discover Sustainability, surveyed 480 randomly selected households in the peri-urban zones of four expanding towns — Debre Markos, Motta, Dejen, and Bichena — and measured both how satisfied farmers were with their compensation and how their livelihoods transformed after the land was gone. The results are a striking mix of genuine material gains and quiet economic precarity, and they carry lessons that reach far beyond the Ethiopian highlands.

The study’s first headline finding is deceptively simple: 55 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the expropriation process, while 45 percent reported dissatisfaction. In other words, the affected population is split almost down the middle, a near-even divide that immediately signals the process is not uniformly failing or succeeding. That split matters because farmland expropriation is one of the most consequential and least reversible events in a rural household’s economic life. Once land is transferred for urban development, the primary productive asset of the family disappears, and everything that follows — income, food security, social standing, and even the daily rhythm of work — must be rebuilt from the compensation payment and whatever skills the household can redeploy. A satisfaction rate hovering at barely more than half suggests that the machinery of compensation in East Gojjam is delivering acceptable outcomes for many, but leaving a very large minority behind.

The structural transformation the researchers documented after expropriation is dramatic. Before losing their land, 81.46 percent of surveyed households relied on subsistence farming as their main livelihood. After expropriation, that figure collapsed to just 17.92 percent. The displaced farmers did not simply become urban professionals or successful small traders; instead, the largest single post-expropriation category was daily wage labor, absorbing 26.25 percent of households, while 11.25 percent fell into chronic unemployment. These numbers describe a classic livelihood transition in the development economics literature: households pushed off the land and into the informal urban labor market, where income is volatile, bargaining power is weak, and there is no harvest cycle to structure the year. Daily wage work in fast-growing Ethiopian towns typically means construction labor, loading, and other physically demanding jobs with no security, no benefits, and no protection against the shocks that a plot of fertile land once buffered.

Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak, and this is where the study becomes genuinely nuanced. Urban expansion significantly improved household access to three fundamental services: electricity, safe piped water, and road networks. Families who once lived in the service shadows of town boundaries found themselves connected to the grid, to clean water infrastructure, and to transport links that open access to markets, schools, and clinics. This dual character — improved public services alongside deteriorating livelihood security — is precisely the tension that makes peri-urban expropriation so difficult to govern. The physical infrastructure of development arrives, but the economic foundation of the displaced households does not automatically follow. A household can gain a lightbulb and a tap while losing the means to pay for anything beyond subsistence.

To move beyond description, the researchers employed an ordered logistic regression model, a statistical technique well suited to satisfaction data that falls on an ordered scale rather than a simple yes-no split. The model identified a set of socioeconomic determinants that push satisfaction up or down, and the strongest positive drivers were exactly what one would hope a well-designed compensation system would provide. The amount of compensation had a positive and highly significant effect on satisfaction, as did diversified modes of compensation — meaning payments or benefits delivered in more than one form — and the prompt timing of payments. Each of these findings is actionable. Farmers who received more money were more satisfied; farmers who received compensation in varied forms were more satisfied; and farmers who were paid quickly, rather than left waiting through bureaucratic delays, were more satisfied. Timing, in particular, is a policy lever that costs nothing in monetary terms and yet shows up as highly significant in the model.

On the negative side of the ledger, the regression revealed that residential displacement, larger family sizes, greater areas of expropriated land, and higher fertility of the lost plots all significantly reduced satisfaction levels. Each of these variables tells a coherent economic story. Families who lost not just their fields but their homes faced a double displacement, forced to rebuild both livelihood and shelter simultaneously. Larger families spread any fixed compensation payment across more mouths, diluting its purchasing power. Larger landholdings represented a bigger income stream that a one-time payment struggled to replace, especially if the household lacked the skills to invest the money productively. And the fertility of the lost plot is perhaps the most telling variable of all: the better the land, the higher the baseline income it generated, and the harder it is for any standardized compensation formula to make the household whole. Fertile land produces returns year after year, while a cash payment is spent once.

One of the most counterintuitive findings in the study concerns agricultural risk. Exposure to agricultural risks — drought, crop failure, price swings, and the other hazards of rain-fed highland farming — was positively associated with satisfaction with compensation. The explanation the authors offer is rooted in how people evaluate losses: farmers who had been struggling with unreliable harvests had lower baseline income expectations from their land, so the compensation they received compared favorably against an income stream that had become uncertain and disappointing. For these households, a guaranteed cash payment, even a modest one, represented an improvement in expected welfare. This finding is a reminder that satisfaction is a relative judgment, not an absolute one, and that compensation policy must account for what farmers think they are losing, not only what the land produces in a good year.

The methodological design of the study strengthens the credibility of these conclusions. The researchers used a multi-stage sampling design and a cross-sectional field survey, randomly selecting 480 households across the peri-urban areas of the four towns, which reduces the risk that the sample reflects only the most accessible or most aggrieved farmers. The combination of descriptive statistics, livelihood transition analysis, and ordered logistic regression allows the study to do three distinct jobs at once: quantify the satisfaction split, map the structural shift in how people earn a living, and isolate the causal correlates of satisfaction with statistical controls in place. The research received no external funding, and the authors, Haymanot Bassie Mognhod and Belete Animaw Beyene of the Department of Economics at Debre Markos University, declare no competing interests — a clean provenance for work that touches on one of the most politically charged processes in rural development.

The policy implications the authors draw are direct: fair property valuations, standardized rehabilitation guidance, and sustainable livelihood restoration frameworks. Each addresses a specific failure mode identified in the data. Fair valuation responds to the finding that compensation amount drives satisfaction and that fertile, productive land is systematically hard to replace with a flat payment. Standardized rehabilitation guidance responds to the vulnerability of households that received cash but had no roadmap for converting it into a durable urban livelihood, ending up in daily wage labor or unemployment. Livelihood restoration frameworks respond to the deepest structural finding of all — the collapse of subsistence farming from over 81 percent of households to under 18 percent — by treating compensation not as an endpoint but as the starting capital for a deliberate transition into stable urban employment or enterprise. As African cities continue to expand at some of the fastest rates in the world, the East Gojjam evidence makes a compelling case that the question is no longer whether farmland will be expropriated, but whether the people who worked it will be equipped to survive the transition. The 55 percent who are satisfied show it can be done; the 45 percent who are not show how easily it is not.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic impacts of farmland expropriation and compensation satisfaction among peri-urban farming households in Northwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Article References: Mognhod, H. B., & Beyene, B. A. (2026). Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Keywords: farmland expropriation, peri-urban expansion, livelihood transition, compensation satisfaction, ordered logistic regression, Ethiopia, East Gojjam, subsistence farming, daily wage labor, urban development, land governance, rural livelihoods