EDITOR’S NOTE: What does this {www:ችጋራም} Woyanne knows about farming? Over 6 million people are starving because of his regime’s mismanagement of Ethiopia’s resources.
By Barney Jopson, Financial Times
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – In the past four years the rain fell in torrents, Demeke Hafiso’s crops sprouted like clockwork, his three-acre plot filled the stomachs of his nine children – and millions of farmers like him powered the Ethiopian economy to double-digit growth.
This year the rain came too late, he has abandoned his field of dead maize, and is sitting by the bedside of his motionless son in a medical centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières. The 16-year-old’s hollowed-out cheeks betray the starvation that has brought him here.
A drought in Ethiopia’s southern highlands between January and May led to the failure of a harvest that has left 4.6m people needing emergency food aid and 5.7m in drought-affected areas requiring other handouts, according to the United Nations.
It is another of the hunger crises that have periodically hit Ethiopia since the famine of 1984-85 and before, but the rural country of 80m is not facing starvation on the same apocalyptic scale.
The drought, however, has serious implications for politics and policy. It has punctured the hubris around the government’s agriculture-led development strategy and made it defensive over its commitment to small-scale farming on state-held land.
Steady rain and bumper harvests helped the Ethiopian economy expand by an annual average of nearly 12 per cent over the past four years, a trend that the ruling regime presented as evidence of the agricultural sector getting stronger.
But the withering effect of this year’s drought suggests it may have simply been getting lucky. “We were doing very well and all of a sudden we collapsed,” says Tewodros Gebremichael, country health director of Merlin, a UK-based aid group. One official at the Economic Commission for Africa, a UN body in Addis Ababa, describes the past four years of plenty as a “missed opportunity”.
Assefa Admassie, director of the Ethiopian Economic Association, says: “Ethiopian agriculture needs a structural transformation. If we depend on small farmers and a fragmented, rain-fed system, we’ll always face this problem.”
Dispute over problems
The government bristles at such criticism. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, says the problems in the south are the result of a “freak event” and he rejects the assertion that the arable farming system has any flaws. The subject is sensitive for his government – which seized power as a group of bush fighters in 1991 and won a disputed election in 2005 – because it has pinned its legitimacy on agricultural development.
The government introduced improved seed varieties, set up a donor-funded welfare programme to help farmers accumulate assets, and built roads so food could be moved from regions with a surplus to those with a shortage. Productivity rose and so did rural incomes as farmers were encouraged to grow cash crops such as coffee alongside their food.
But observers say the official story of an agricultural transformation does not tally with what they see on the ground, where micro-irrigation systems are sparse and the distribution of drought-resistant crops poor.
Population growth as contributing factor
One reason for the intractability of Ethiopia’s hunger problem is the pace of population growth – estimated to be 2 to 3 per cent a year – as well as the custom of subdividing land between children. Over-cultivation in some areas has already damaged the soil irreversibly.
The government is criticised by liberal commentators for not allowing land to be privately owned, leaving farmers with little incentive to invest in improving their plots. It is a policy that can be traced back to the Meles regime’s command-and-control instincts and its suspicion of market forces.
Eyessus Zafu, president of the Addis Ababa Chamber of Commerce, is one of several businessmen urging the government to go corporate. “Capital-intensive commercial agriculture would have given you the surplus you need,” he says. Bigger farms would create opportunities for land consolidation and mechanisation.
But Mr Meles says it is “patently stupid” to advocate a wholesale switch to big farms.
For Mr Demeke, the immediate priority is to avoid having to bring another child to the centre: “The government could give us cows and oxen and we hope God will give us enough rain so we can plant our own food again.”
6 thoughts on “Meles calls big farming “patently stupid””
This midget man no good for nothing and his other stooges holding farming lands and regulating it is the ONLY way they can keep the Ethiopian people under their submission; they know clearly the majority of Ethiopian people are peasants (nearly 85% of the entire population)that depends what the outcome would be from their land and for the butchers of Ethiopian people giving land to the people will not help their CASH FLOW from NGO’s and other deadly organization; rather their prefer to hold the land as the hostage and with that the entire Ethiopian people becomes their hostages! God save the Ethiopian people from these ruthless mafia family!
It is “patently stupid” when he is asked about giving large lands to Ethiopian business people, but it is not when the land is given to Djiboutians and wealthy Arabs?
He’s so stupid.
The government should allow the farmers to sell their land should they wish to do so. Hopefully someone will be able to buy the small lands and farm on a larger scale which makes it efficient to use farming machines.
As for the population growth, I don’t think it can be reduced to sustainable growth rate for as long as people do not have any proper retirement incomes (i.e. pensions).
Folks,
If you have listened to the whole interview he explains why big farms are “patently stupid” at this juncture. He had a convincing reason for saying what he said.
Given that “starving” “mismanagement” are facts the explanation of big farms being “stupid” is sound as well.
Can any of you explain why big farms are the smart thing to do now?
Otherwise, mocking a none issue because you are incapable or lazy to come up of anything new on your own is pathetic.
BTW, I read your sight and listen to your interviews etc. I think you’re doing a great service. However, by not printing independent views of such as myself you’re stifling free thoughts.
FYI: The following is the sight of the full interview big farms being “patently stupid”
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto082720080821207263
FT: One comment I’ve heard from several people about agriculture is that the government has been focusing very much, as you said, on commercialising small-scale farms. But these people say is you should be focused on big-scale farming and creating large commercial enterprises, because that’s the way to prevent a recurrence of the food shortages. Why have you decided to focus on the small scale rather than go big?
MZ: Because the alternative is patently stupid.
FT: Why is that?
MZ: Let’s look at two factors. The first factor is the availability of capital and savings in this economy. There are very, very low savings and very limited capital availability. If we were to invest in large-scale, commercial, mechanised farming, then we would have to deplete whatever savings we have in establishing these large-scale farms, and what do we get in return? We get in return some employment, but not much. If we were to focus on the commercialisation of small-scale farming, we wouldn’t need that much capital. We would be using the excess resource we have, which is labour and land, and we would be combining these two without too much capital to produce more. Secondly, we would be employing millions of people on their farms and giving them income. The problem that we face this year is not about production. It’s about income distribution and income distribution in Ethiopia is not going to be improved by abandoning small-scale farms and concentrating on large-scale farms. Fortunately in our case, to the extent that capital can be imported from abroad, we can do both because we have unutilised land in the lowlands where there is not much labour and we can combine that with foreign capital to supplement the small-scale farming. Such supplementary large-scale commercial farming is part of our strategy, but it is not the central piece of our strategy
Meles tries to speak as someone who knows about economics. The truth is that he doesn’t have a clue as to how you can produce enough food in the country. Surrounded by a herd of idiot cadres who never ask him a single question, he thinks he knows better than anybody else.
It is his communist land policy that is prolonging famine in the country but he doesn’t understand it. He has no clue as to why only 5% of the American popualtion is able to feed the rest 95% of the popualtion. he doesn’t understand the role of modern big commercial farms in food self-suffciency. With the huge water and land resource Ethiopia has, famine could have been history by now, had it nor been for the stupid land policy of the morone Meles and his idiotic cadres.
Famine can olnly be eradicated in Ethiopia with the removal of the woyane morons.