From: Yemane Natnael (yemane_natnael@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Sep 25 2008 - 08:58:11 EDT
The Marxist roots of Ethiopia's suffering
Once again, the
twin spectres of drought and starvation stalk the land of Ethiopia. UN
sources suggest that four million Ethiopians now need what they call
"emergency assistance," while another eight million need what is more
vaguely described as "food relief."
Already, thousands of people
are dying. The first to expire are the very young and the very old. In
some areas of the country, people are dying of starvation and
malnutrition while their goats and sheep get fat eating crops that will
not be harvested until late September.
Few saw this coming. Two
years ago, Ethiopian officials boasted that food surpluses would allow
their country to sell corn to neighbouring Sudan. The government has
been investing more than a sixth of its budget in agricultural
development, far above the average in other African countries. Child
mortality has been reduced by 40%, and the agricultural sector has been
growing by 10% annually over the last few years.
But in this part
of the world, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said, "one unexpected
weather event can push us over the precipice." Only 1% of Ethiopia is
irrigated, meaning that a lack of rainfall can produce catastrophic
results for the five-out-of-six Ethiopians who eke out a living through
subsistence agriculture.
Famine-relief food distribution is never
a straightforward affair in an African country. Those (mostly southern)
regions where voters did not support the regime in recent elections
typically complain that they are cheated of food aid at the expense of
more "loyal' parts of the country in the north.
Inter-regional
friction is no stranger to Ethiopia. Five hundred years ago,
Cushitic-speaking Muslim tribesmen from the desert plains of (what is
now) southeastern Ethiopia and the borderlands of Somalia declared a
jihad and attacked the Semitic-speaking Christian highland kingdoms
whose emperors claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba. With the timely
help of Portuguese musketeers under the leadership of the son of Vasco
da Gama, the southerners were repelled. The next 400 years of Ethiopian
history led to a gradual domination and conquest of these southern
tribes, who were vanquished once and for all by the last Emperor of
Ethiopia, Hailie Selassie.
Selassie himself was overthrown by a
group of Marxist revolutionaries, who plunged Ethiopia into a brutal
civil war. Then came the famous drought of 1984, which brought us We
Are the World.
One of the reasons so many people starved in
Ethiopia during that time was that the ruling regime would not let food
from food-rich areas go to food-poor areas -- because the latter were
dominated by opponents of the government. Nor would they allow people
to migrate from food-poor to food-rich districts. "Starve or submit"
became the watchword of this new regime.
The Derg, as this new
regime called itself, was then ousted by a coalition of central and
northern Semitic-speaking Ethiopians who considered themselves
Marxists. But when they came to power, the Berlin wall had fallen
already -- so they made peace with the West, joined the war on terror,
and started taking baby steps toward liberal democracy and the
liberalization of their economy.
Nevertheless,
the country remains riven by old conflicts. The governing elites are
suspicious of the southerners, especially their newfound interest in
radical Islam.
It comes as no surprise that, in the current
crisis, some of the worst-affected and most neglected areas are in the
southeast corner of the country, where Muslim peasants have been in
open rebellion for over a decade.
According to "Radio Freedom" --
operated by the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Army -- on July 4,
2008, at least 13 Ethiopian government soldiers were killed; 15 others
were reportedly killed in an attack in the Galalshe district. The
Ethiopian government claims these rebels get support from sympathetic
Arabs, and has accused Qatar of meddling in Ethiopia's internal
affairs. (Qatar, for its own reasons, supports the neighbouring Red Sea
state of Eritrea, which just a few years ago fought a border war with
Ethiopia and expresses support for Ethiopian rebels of Somali ethnicity
in the southeast of the country.)
Ethiopia has neither confirmed
nor denied that such attacks have taken place on its soldiers. But
either way, it is understandable that Ethiopian government employees
may be less than enthusiastic about personally overseeing food aid in
the southern parts of the country.
Exacerbating these regional
frictions, and this year's extreme weather events, are what may be
considered the two root causes of the famine: population growth and
land tenure.
In 1984, during the height of the drought and civil
war, Ethiopia had just under 34 million inhabitants. The population now
stands at 77 million: In just more than one generation, the population
of the country has doubled. Despite the government's investment in
agriculture, overall investment in education has gone down, which
stifles the possibility of rural innovation.
And, although overall food
production has increased, the World Bank has noted that per capita
production has declined. That is to say, each peasant produces less
food than he once did. Even during good years, 6% of the rural
peasantry is supported by government-and donor-delivered food relief.
After
the murder of Hailie Selassie by the Derg in the early '80s, the
government revolutionized the land-tenure system by giving peasants
enough land to till according to the number of children they then had.
This simplistic tenure system has been kept intact by the present
government. Peasants do not have title to their own plots, and there is
an incentive to get more land by having more children to till it. But
there is little incentive to make that land more productive: Farmers
are fearful that if they invest in any aspect of land improvement they
could lose their plots to local elites with political connections.
As
peasants do not own their own land, they cannot use it as collateral to
get loans they need to buy seed or fertilizer, which could in turn be
used to create a food surplus to be used in case of drought. They also
are denied the right to sell their land and move somewhere else-- to a
more fertile region or to the city to try their luck in urban
occupations.
More food aid will help prevent mass starvation in
Ethiopia in the short term. But in the long-run, it needs something
else: a peasantry with the same right to own and control their land
that most farmers in the world take for granted. Freed from government
shackles, they will unleash a green revolution that will feed their
families.
gwclarfield@yahoo.com-Geoffrey Clarfield is a Toronto-based writer.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=832985&p=2
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