It is hard to talk about Ethiopia these days in
non-apocalyptic terms. Millions of Ethiopians are facing their old enemy again
for the third time in nearly forty years. The Black Horseman of famine is
stalking that ancient land. A year ago, MelesZenawi’s regime denied there was any famine. Only ‘minor
problems’ of spot shortages of food which will ‘be soon brought under control,’
it said dismissively. The regime boldly predicted a 7-10 percent increase in
the annual harvest over 2007. Simon Mechale, head of
the country’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency, proudly declared:
‘Ethiopia will soon fully ensure its food security.’… Zenawi’s
regime has been downplaying and double-talking the famine situation. It is too
embarrassed to admit the astronomical number of people facing starvation in a
country which, by the regime’s own accounts, is bursting at the seams from
runaway economic development.
I concluded with a rhetorical question:
Images of the human wreckage of Ethiopia’s rampaging
famine will soon begin to make dramatic appearances on television in Western
living rooms. The Ethiopian government will be out in full force panhandling the international community for food aid.
Compassion fatigued donors may or may not come to the rescue. Ethiopians,
squeezed between the Black Horseman [Scriptural metaphor for famine] and the
Noisome Beast [Scriptural metaphor for evil beasts that terrify the land], will
once again cry out to the heavens in pain and humiliation as they await for handouts from a charitable world. Isn’t that a low
down dirty shame for a proud people to bear?
It is now July 2011 and the Black Horseman is standing at
the gate. No more “emergencies”, just plain old-fashioned famine. This time it
is the international aid agencies that are frantically sounding the 5-alarm
famine. They warn that if donors do not provide substantial emergency food aid
to 12 million people now, there will be famine of Biblical-proportions in
Ethiopia and other neighboring countries unseen in the last 60 years. UNICEF
warns that “millions of children and women are at risk from death and disease
unless a rapid and speedy response is put into action.”
The silently creeping famine was visible to anyone who
bothered to study the periodic reports of the aid agencies (and read between
the lines) and regularly monitored the “famine early warning systems” over the
past few years. But until now, no aid agency or donor country could force
itself to use the “F” word. Political correctness had trumped the truth and the
welfare of millions. The very aid agencies that are now frothing at the mouth
sounding the alarm of a doomsday famine were describing the problem for the
last few years in terms of “severe malnutrition”, “food shortages”, “acute food
security phases” “food insecurity, scarcity, insufficiency and
deprivation”, “chronic dietary deficiency”, “endemic
malnutrition” and other clever phrases. They simply could not call a spade
a spade. But famine by any other name is still famine. The “severe
malnutrition” of yesterday has become today’s famine silently spreading to
consume 12 million people.
Apocalypse in 40 Years?
Lately, everybody has been talking about facts and
figures. It’s been all about percentages. MelesZenawi says between now and 2015 Ethiopia’s economy will be
growing at 12-15 percent a year. Recently, he told his party members: “We have
devised a plan which will enable us to produce surplus and be able to feed
ourselves by 2015 without the need for food aid.” That plan is anchored in what Zenawi calls “agricultural development–led
industrialization” (ADLI), which purports to focus intensively on agriculture
by technologically boosting the low level of productivity of small scale
farmers and commercially linking them to the non-agricultural (industrial)
sector. Zenawi says by 2015 extreme poverty in
Ethiopia will be cut by 50 percent along with hunger (“severe malnutrition”)
consistent with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. The Ethiopian currency
has been devalued by 20 percent over the past year. The annual inflation rate
is galloping at 34.7 percent according to official reports (likely much
higher). The International Monetary Fund predicts Ethiopia will likely have
economic growth of 7.5 percent in 2011. On the political side, Zenawi said he won the May 2010 election by 99.6 percent.
But lost in the stacks of fantasy percentages is a little big 3 percent that
will ultimately determine the survivability of the Ethiopia people.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau had frightening
predictions for Ethiopia, Nigeria and India. By 2050, India will be the most
populous nation in the world, bypassing China sometime in the mid-2020s.
Nigeria’s current population of 166 million will explode to 402 million. In
just four decades, Ethiopia’s population will more than triple to 278 million,
placing that country in the top 10 most populous countries in the world.
Ethiopia’s population growth has been spiraling upwards
for decades. In 1967, the population was 23.5 million. It increased to 51
million in 1990 and by 2003, it had reached 68 million. In 2008, that number
increased to 80 million. The Census Bureau estimates Ethiopia’s population
today at 91 million. Since 1995, the average annual rate of population growth
has remained at over 3 percent.
Every government and regime in Ethiopia over the past
one-half century has blamed famine on “acts of God.” For the last two decades,
the current regime has blamed “food shortages”, “chronic or severe
malnutrition”, “food insecurity”, etc., on “poor and erratic rains,” “drought
conditions,” “deforestation and soil erosion,” “overgrazing,” and other
“natural factors”. Zenawi’s regime even had the
brazen audacity to blame “Western indifference” and “apathy” in not providing
timely food aid for the suffering of starving Ethiopians. There is not a single
instance in which any Ethiopian government or regime has ever taken even
partial responsibility for food shortages, extreme malnutriion
or failure to act and prevent starvation and famine.
The issue of “food security” aside, the central question
is: Does Zenawihave a
policy to deal with the little big 3 percent problem?
In 1993, Zenawi’s “Transitional
Government of Ethiopia” in its “National Population Policy of Ethiopia” (NPPE)
declared that “its major goal [was] the harmonization
of the rate of population growth and the capacity of the country for the
development and rational utilization of natural resources thereby creating conditions
conductive to the improvement of the level of welfare of the population.”
Among the major objectives of the NPPE included “closing
the gap between high population growth and low economic productivity through
planned reduction of population growth…, reducing the rate to urban migration,
reducing the current total fertility rate of 7.7 children per woman to
approximately 4.0 by the year 2015… mounting an effective country wide
population information and education programme
addressing issues pertaining to small family size and its relationship with
human welfare and environmental security.”
Among the strategies to be used in achieving these
objectives included “expanding clinical and community based contraceptive
distribution services, raising the minimum age at marriage for girls from the
current lower age limit of 15 to, at least, 18 years, making population and
family life related education and information widely available via formal and
informal media”, facilitating delivery of population and family planning
related services by non-governmental organizations and changing the law “to
remove unnecessary restrictions pertaining to the advertisement, propagation
and popularization of diverse conception control methods.”
Given the fact that the average annual rate of population
growth in Ethiopia has remained at over 3 percent since 1995,commenting
on the NPPE is belaboring the obvious.
Will There Be Ethiopia in 2050?
Whether Ethiopia survives as a viable nation in 2050 free
of war, disease, pestilence and famine will not depend on an imaginary 15
percent economic growth or a ludicrous 99.6 percent election victory. It will
depend on what is done to deal with the little big 3 percent problem. In
other words, overpopulation poses the single most critical problem and decisve issue in Ethiopia today and the years to come.
Thomas Malthus, the 18th Century British
economist argued that human population, if unchecked, tends to grow much faster
than the capacity of the land to produce food. He explained that population can
be controlled through “preventive checks” (such as family planning, wide use of
contraceptives to slow growth, marriage at later age) or “positive checks”
(mortality caused by war, disease, plague, disaster). The bottom line is that
if Ethiopia cannot adequately feed, clothe and shelter 90 million of its people
today, there is no way on earth she can do so for 278 million in just 40 years.
If the “Malthusian catastrophe” is what is looming on the Ethiopian horizon,
the outcome is predictable and certain: massive starvation and famine, extreme
overcrowding, endemic poverty, total depletion of natural resources and massive
environmental degradation. Widespread and extreme civil strife, conflict over
scarce resources and epidemics will complete the grim picture.
What needs to be done is pretty clear. As the Indian
economics Nobel laureate AmartyaSen
has convincingly argued, the best way to avert famines (and simultaneously deal
with the underlying problem of overpopulation) is by institutionalizing
multiparty democracy and strengthening human rights: “No famine has ever taken
place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy” because
democratic governments “have to win elections and face public criticism, and
have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other
catastrophes.”
Ethiopia’s famine today is a famine borne of “food
scarcity” as much as it is a famine borne of a scarcity of democracy and good
governance. Ethiopians are famished for democracy, starved of human rights,
thirst for the rule of law, ache for accountability of those in power and yearn
to breathe free from the chokehold of dictatorship. But after two decades of
one-man, one-party rule, we do not even see the ghost of democracy on
Ethiopia’s parched landscape. We can only see a malignant and entrenched
dictatorship that continues to cling to power like ticks on a milk cow; and in
the dark and gloomy 40-year Ethiopian horizon, we see the specter of the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse aiming their swords, spears and arrows against a
defenseless population of 278 million. Our only shield is a genuine multiparty
democracy that functions under the rule of law!
Previous commentaries by the author are available at:
www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ and http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/
