Abstract

Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa yet one of the least urbanized in the world. Despite the population of Ethiopia are overwhelmingly living in the rural area and agriculture has immense role in the national economy, the relationship between population and agrarian change is underrated. The objective of this paper is to comprehend agrarian change with population dynamism in terms of agrarian population and agricultural growth and productivity. It is construed based on desk research. The paper employed the population theory of Boserup to underpin the analysis.  It found that the performance of agriculture is poorly hampered by its own structural problems. It failed to increase production and productivity neither properly feed the population.  This is mainly the historical biases against agriculture; government poorly advised and devised policies, low investment in the sector, high population growth, climatic challenges, and uneven population distribution. It is also observed that population growth is not solely responsible for slow and lag of agrarian transformation. Instead, there are several structural and policy issues that setback agrarian transition. Finally, it is concluded that under slow rate of rural-urban migration and low agricultural productivity, the rate of agrarian transformation is slothful.

Key words: Population, Ethiopia, agrarian, agricultural growth, transformation.