DEVELOPMENT: Ethiopia Must Invest in Solutions to Hunger – Report

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Feb 5 2003 (IPS) - To prevent repeats of a deadly looming famine that could cost thousands of lives, Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest nations, needs to adopt food-for-school programmes, create efficient road networks and develop a working food market, says a think tank here.

In a brief report released on Wednesday, Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) warned that as many as 15 million Ethiopians could face famine in the coming months with the current crisis being "as large as, or potentially even larger than, the 1984-85 famine".

Although the Horn of Africa nation has increased its food production by 70 percent since the 1980s, it is still in dire need of immediate relief, coupled with long-term policies to stop famine from recurring, said IFPRI.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s most impoverished states, with annual per capita income of barely 100 dollars and a population of 65 million people of whom nearly two-thirds are illiterate. Although the country exports small amounts of coffee, sugar cane, oilseeds, hides and beeswax, it remains highly indebted and poverty and diseases are rampant.

"The key issue is to find a bridge between short term relief and long term development," said Joachim von Braun, director general of IFPRI. "It is doable."

Braun said the "bridge" should be founded on three pillars.

First, the country should develop a food for education programme as a strong incentive to get children to attend school. Braun said a similar programme in Bangladesh succeeded in raising school enrolment by 40 percent over the past few years.

Second, a food-for-work programme to encourage road construction is necessary to get food to needy areas and to move local trade from regions with plentiful supply to deprived ones.

Finally, with the help of international donors, small-scale investments should be made in trade financing and trade banking to help develop market institutions, advised Braun.

"The food for school programme worked wonders in parts of Africa, especially Botswana but also in parts of Ethiopia itself. The need for market institutions for the market to function is increasingly well understood. That’s the way to go."

But although many organisations and economists agree on the gravity of the situation in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa, not all agree on "the way to go". The point of contention has been the true reasons for the latest famines on the continent. The issue is important because it could determine future action to prevent further food shortages.

In December, another U.S.-based research group, the Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy, blamed the famine in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa on policies imposed by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

It argued that those bodies, backed by the financial and political muscle of the United States, have exacerbated famine in Africa through their structural adjustment programmes, which are designed to open up economies to international trade and finance.

These plans, argued Food First, coerce indebted nations to pay down debt by cutting services for their citizens, exporting their crops, dismantling their crop reserves, and devaluing their currencies.

But IFPRI said Wednesday that local causes were behind Ethiopia’s persistent food crises, including poor governance (mostly in the past), the helplessness of its farmers, problems with food production, and markets that do not function.

"I don’t see an external force here in the case of Ethiopia," von Braun said. "Nobody was pushing Ethiopia to sell extensively. Food surplus was short-term," he added, "so, let’s not look for external culprits".

Von Braun, whose group’s donors include the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, referred to a legacy of poverty, which will take many years to overcome, and Ethiopia’s "structural situation" as reasons behind the famine.

The country emerged in the early 1990s from three decades of prolonged civil war and a brutal, centrally planned economy.

According to the IFPRI report, Ethiopia’s millions of small-scale farmers remain rooted in subsistence agriculture. They are almost entirely dependent on the weather, and the country is prone to drought three to four years out of every 10.

Five to six million people simply do not have the money to buy food, even in periods of surplus, which increases the vulnerability of poor farmers, it added.

To reduce such susceptibility, argues the report, the government, under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, needs to introduce crop insurance and invest, with the help of international donors, in systems to better measure and forecast production and weather patterns.

IFPRI says that grain yields in Ethiopia average little more than one ton per hectare compared to nearly six tons per hectare in the United States.

Farmers in remote areas also find it difficult and costly to buy fertilizer and other materials and transport them over long distances on bad roads. In northern Ethiopia, for example, the average distance to the nearest market town is nearly 40 kilometres..

In 1984, there were reports of surplus in the south while one million people died of hunger in the northeastern region of the country, and today only one-quarter of food produced reaches the market.

"That locks poor farmers into subsistence agriculture, which condemns them to poverty," said the report.

The government and international aid donors must invest in infrastructure: roads, telecommunications networks, and modern storage, it advised.

Because 85 percent of its population is agriculture-based, Ethiopia must remain committed to developing this most critical sector, added IFPRI.

"Averting food crises in the future requires increasing the incomes of the vast majority of the population, in part through investing in research and extension to assist farmers in producing a diversity of crops and livestock, including high-value products," concluded the report.

IFPRI (www.ifpri.org)

Food First (www.foodfirst.org)

International Famine Centre (www.ucc.ie/famine/Latest/latest.html)