Land use planning in a peri-urban village of Eritrea : the Adi-Segdo case study

Abstract

Land is the basic resource and major production asset of Eritrea. The economy of the country and livelihood of majority of the population in the country depends on agriculture. But, injudicious utilization, over-exploitation and lack of proper management resulted in declining the quality and potential of the land resources. In the past 50 years Eritrea was deprived of any agricultural or non-agricultural development activities especially during the Ethiopian colonial period (1952-1991). After independence in 1991 the social and economic growth of the country started to revive. As a result different investments were implemented during the last 10 years. But almost all the investments were based on the ambitions and goodwill of the government and the investors. Most of these development activities were done without proper resource surveying for optimum and sustainable resource utilization, hence great competition and losses of good agricultural land to non-agricultural uses were experienced during these 10 years. Resource surveying, land evaluation and land use planning are new concepts to the country. Dent and Young (1981), pointed out the sharpest conflict in land development occurs in the urban fringe zone where there is competing demand on land for food production, industrial crops, urban expansion and industrial development. This is happening in the study area. The study area, Adi-Segdo, is a village located close to Asmara city, which was incorporated under the city administration in 1994. The people of the village are dependent on land or agriculture for their survival. Due to lack of land resource inventories and determination of the potential use of specific units of land, agricultural lands of the village have been allocated for non-agricultural development activities. This study was aimed at developing a land use plan for the area by assessmg land resources (climate, soil and etc.) and evaluating the potential of these resources for recommending optimum, sustainable and appropriate land utilization for each mapping unit. It concludes with a provisional land use plan for Adi-Segdo, which could help in allocating land units with no crop production potential for urbanization and other non¬agricultural development activities. In addition recommendations are made for possible improvements in farming systems and more efficient utilization of the scarce available agricultural resources, especially water and arable land. At the moment dairy and poultry farm products are more profitable than vegetable crops. Hence these farming enterprises are strongly recommended and should get attention by the community and government institutions. The new land reform promulgated by the government in 1994 is focused in equitable right of use, optimizing sustainable production, protection of natural environment against degradation and increases the effectiveness of economic growth of rural and urban population. But for different reasons this is not yet implemented. According to this study the delay of its implementation has further aggravated social problems and land degradation. This study has recommended a possible way of implementing the new land tenure system. From experience farmers know the potential of each land unit more than any expert from outside. This indigenous knowledge of farmers with inputs from land resource experts can play a great role in land classification and allocation among households. This recommendation can be tested in the study area, whereby this document could also be used as a base.