The Fight against Starvation

According to a popular saying now a bit outdatedas long as it rains in the United States and Canada, it doesn’t matter if the rains are totally absent in Ethiopia. This is, of course, a funnyand derogatory statement in that it shows the extent to which this country is suffering intensely from an unending seizure of dependency/aid/ syndrome. Unfortunately though, the “joke” is only too true. The dependency syndrome has grown to unmanageable levels.

Far from the sporadic cycles of drought and starvation witnessed when Haile-Selassie was in power, it is no exaggeration to say that the true cycles of periodic drought were rooted in the long past. Then gripped with an unrealistic dictates of Marxism/ Leninism, a science that was not only too complex to be understood, but was implemented by the morons of the regime, the Dergue only managed to send millions of people into hunger in the name of a far grander vision of providing for “each according to his needs”.

The distorted and impracticable socialist philosophy the regime followed led to a mass confiscation of every imaginable private land from the farmer into a destructive nationalization campaign that virtually tied the working spirits of the farmer in general and the productivity of vast amounts of productive land of the country. This was compounded with the country’s clinical proneness to periodic bouts of drought leading to the death of millions of people. Despite all this though, the Dergue regime could also be given some positive marks in that it somehow managed to at least initiate vast commercial farms owned by the government which played crucial roles in supplementing the meager produce of the country’s farmers.

And then, of course, it was the turn of the present regime and situations began to deteriorate in ways never witnessed in the history of this country. It was not surprising that this regime, given the socialist ideology it too used to propagate while its cadres were in the bush, also banned the privatization of land despite all opposition from all sides. The worst mistake it committed, however, is its neglect of the commercial farms initiated when the Dergue was in power, allowing them to deteriorate into useless projects. The result is the massive failure in food production that was witnessed several times since 1991, leaving close to a dozen million citizens on the brink of starvation and death. It is a painful irony that in its passionate plans to lead the country along the path of “peace, development, and democracy,” the regime has been boasting of its plans to enable the population to eat at least “three times a day” in the ten years since they assumed power and even hoped to “export food grains to Central Africa”.

The result of this nonsense is that about fourteen million people are at present starving. This is getting better any time in the future. And what are its plans for the future? Nothing insightful. In a new move, the government is now stressing the importance of “water containment” projects to be launched all over the country to help compensate for any possible outbreaks of drought in the future. This, of course, may not be an unsound idea. But one is tempted to ask if it wasn’t better for the authorities to help prevent the present catastrophe.

The past may be dead and buried for all its bitter memories. But we need to brace ourselves up to tackle the problems of the future. More genuine and bold measures have to be taken to allow for the privatization of land, the expansion and massive encouragement of domestic and foreign investors in the agricultural field. Last but not least, the expansion and adoption of meaningful agricultural research need to be encouraged and pursued by this government if we are to be spared future catastrophes.