 The rural economy faced a crisis as pressing as when the TPLF launched its revolution eighteen years earlier.Evidence of this was apparent in 1994 when parts of Tigray again suffered famine conditions.The TPLF committed to rehabilitating and developing rural economy and they have long recognized that its land reforms and rehabilitation programmes cannot by themselves overcome the contradiction between an ever-increasing population on one hand, and a fertile land base which can only be marginally enlarged in the near future, on the other.