ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Prices of staples like meat, cooking oil and bread have been on a roller coaster ride in Ethiopia.
The government in January imposed price controls to combat rising prices, giving food sellers long lines of customers but barely any profit. Now, after price controls were dropped earlier this month, prices have again risen to levels that most Ethiopians can’t afford.
Some 3.2 million Ethiopians depend on food aid. Recent government figures put inflation at nearly 35 percent in the last year.
In a rare show of rebellion in a country historically used to authoritarianism, Ethiopian consumers earlier this month started a text-message campaign to boycott meat in an attempt to force prices down. The campaign has not worked.
Ethiopia expects World Bank funding this week
By William Davison, Bloomberg
Ethiopia expects the World Bank to decide this week whether to provide an additional $60 million of funding for an irrigation project in its Nile Basin, a Water and Energy Ministry official said.
The Washington-based lender provided $100 million since 2008 to support the Nile Basin Irrigation and Drainage Project, Hayalsew Yilma, program coordinator at the ministry, said in an interview yesterday in the Addis Ababa, the capital.
“We are negotiating with the bank for additional funding,” Hayalsew said. “It’s going to be presented to the bank’s board on June 23.”
The project aims to irrigate 20,000 hectares (49,421 acres) of land to help transform subsistence farmers in the area in northwestern Ethiopia into sellers of surplus crops. Studies are being conducted on the potential for an additional 97,000 hectares to be irrigated.
Ethiopia’s five-year growth plan aims to increase the amount of irrigated land fivefold to about 10,000 hectares by mid-2015, Hayalsew said. Bank funding may be forthcoming “as long as the projects do not cause significant harm to downstream countries,” he said. As much as 2.2 million hectares of Ethiopia’s 3.7 million hectares of irrigable land is in the Nile Basin, according to the ministry.
Increasing irrigation may boost food security in Africa’s second-most populous nation. About 3 million Ethiopians currently receive emergency assistance and another 7.8 million get food or cash under an aid program to support them, the United Nations said in April.
“Countries like Ethiopia are no longer looking at food security, poverty, and climate change separately,” World Bank spokesman Heather Worley said in an e-mailed response to questions on June 17. “Climate-smart agriculture and irrigation practices are key to solving food security issues and increasing crop yields.”
To contact the reporter on this story: William Davison in Addis Ababa via Nairobi at [email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Richardson in Nairobi at [email protected].
