The Real Cause Of Famine In Ethiopia - Statistical Data Included

Ecologist, The, Sept, 2000 by Michel Chossudovsky

In turn, the reforms led to the fracture of the federal fiscal system. Budget transfers to the State governments were slashed leaving the regions to their own devices. Supported by several donors, "regionalisation" was heralded as a "devolution of powers from the federal to the regional governments". The Bretton Woods institutions knew exactly what they were doing. In the words of the IMF, "[the regions] capacity to deliver effective and efficient development interventions varies widely, as does their capacity for revenue collection

Wrecking the peasant economy

Agricultural markets were willfully manipulated on behalf of the agribusiness conglomerates. The World Bank demanded the rapid removal of price controls and all subsidies to farmers. Transportation and freight prices were deregulated serving to boost food prices in remote areas affected by drought. In turn, the markets for farm inputs including fertiliser and seeds were handed over to private traders including Pioneer Hi-Bred International which entered into a lucrative partnership with Ethiopia Seed Enterprise (ESE), the government's seed monopoly.

At the outset of the reforms in 1992, USAID under its Title III program "donated" large quantities of US fertiliser "in exchange for free market reforms":

Various agricultural commodities [will be provided] in exchange for reforms of grain marketing... and [the] elimination of food subsidies... The reform agenda focuses on liberalisation and privatisation in the fertiliser and transport sectors in return for financing fertiliser and truck imports... These program initiatives have given us [an] "entree" ... in defining major [policy] issues..."

While the stocks of donated US fertiliser were rapidly exhausted, the imported chemicals contributed to displacing local fertiliser producers. The same companies involved in the fertiliser import business were also in control of the domestic wholesale distribution of fertiliser using local level merchants as intermediaries.

Increased output was recorded in commercial farms and in irrigated areas (where fertiliser and high yielding seeds had been applied). The overall tendency, however, was towards greater economic and social polarisation in the countryside, marked by significantly lower yields in less productive marginal lands occupied by the poor peasantry. Even in areas where output had increased, farmers were caught in the clutch of the seed and fertiliser merchants.

In 1997, the Atlanta based Carter Center -- which was actively promoting the use of biotechnology tools in maize breeding -- proudly announced that "Ethiopia [had] become a food exporter for the first time". Yet in a cruel irony, the donors ordered the dismantling of the emergency gain reserves (set up in the wake of the 1984-85 famine) and the authorities acquiesced.

Instead of replenishing the country's emergency food stocks, grain was exported to meet Ethiopia's debt servicing obligations. Close to one million tonnes of the 1996 harvest was exported, an amount amply sufficient (according to FAO figures) to meet the 1999-2000 emergency. In fact the same food staple which had been exported (namely maize) was re-imported barely a few months later. The world market had confiscated Ethiopia's grain reserves.