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Ethiopia: A Delicate Balance of Population, Food, and Enterprise
FrontLines - September 2009
By Ashtar Analeed Marcus
Traditional farming and herding
may well be at the core of the problems facing Ethiopia, the largest country in the highly unstable Horn of Africa, said Glenn Anders, outgoing director of USAID’s office in Ethiopia.
Glenn Anders, right, shakes hands with local official Kalcha Boru in Dubluk, Oromiya, during an August 2008 ceremony to inaugurate a new livestock market as part of USAID’s Pastoralist Livelihood Initiative in Ethiopia.
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The country has been plagued with repeated food scarcity and democratization challenges. But Anders sees hope.
“It’s a huge and productive agricultural system, although not nearly as high in productivity as it needs to be,” he said.
“They are already able to feed a great majority of their people. It’s just that there are so many people that, with 80 million, when there’s a crisis, it’s not just the hundreds of thousands who suffer as is the case in Somalia and Kenya. It’s always millions [in Ethiopia].”
The country produced more cereal in 2008 than neighboring Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda combined—16 million tons. But there was a critical lack of rain in 2008 that led to food shortages
in the Horn of Africa.
That year, the United States spent $1 billion in assistance to Ethiopia, with $880 million coming through USAID—mainly to supply food and combat
HIV/AIDS.
Anders oversaw the delivery of this $880 million in aid for Ethiopia, including $536 million in food aid overall.
“With this agrarian society, parts of Ethiopia make you feel like a walk back into the Bible— it is really that far behind in terms of technology,” Anders said.
“With 80 million people, 65 million of whom are farmers, it’s very difficult to penetrate into and change these traditional agrarian systems and make them much more productive.”
But the percentage of people who are classified by USAID as “food insecure”
is not out of line with many other African countries—it’s just that the numbers are much larger. Anders said the problem is that there is not enough agriculturally based investment, commercialization,
or manufacturing
in rural areas.
“You don’t want to urbanize too quickly,” Anders said. “But without
building up secondary
towns, market towns, with rural centers of manufacturing and labor-intensive types of enterprise, too many people stay on the land as farmers. And the land can’t support that many farmers.”
Ethiopia lacks major mineral exports and lacks the tourism of Kenya.
USAID is helping Ethiopia branch out from an agrarian society through micro-financing, credits, and promotion of small businesses.
“The flower industry is an example of one that took off,” Anders said. The country produces
and exports roses from the Rift Valley, which have been successful because of the latitude, high altitudes, and low-cost labor. Within five years, the roses won a reputation in the world markets as being high quality at low price.
A large amount of assistance has focused on Ethiopians affected by HIV/AIDS.
For example, when Muti Tolcha was diagnosed with HIV, he received counseling and a $115 grant to start a business from the Hope Center, funded by two Christian Orthodox organizations
through the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Tolcha was then able launch his business and hire two assistants. He had learned to weave traditional white Ethiopian cloth, gabi.
“My hope is to live long to educate my children,” Tolcha said, “to teach people the consequences
of stigmatizing people with HIV and teach people to be tested for HIV.”
The rate of HIV/AIDS infections
in Ethiopia is the lowest among the countries assisted by PEPFAR. Most cases are in the capital city Addis Ababa and major towns. Less than 1 percent of rural people have HIV/AIDS, according to surveys.
With its large size, population,
and economy, and its strong military, “Ethiopia is the ballast
of stability for the Horn of Africa,” Anders said.
Now at USAID’s headquarters as a senior advisor in Washington, Anders passed the torch to USAID’s former Iraq Task Force Director, Thomas Staal, who was sworn in as the Agency’s Ethiopia office director July 8.
★
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