China invests in Ethiopia but at what cost?

China’s minister for commerce says trade with Ethiopia will reach $3 billion by 2015.

ASK AN Addis Ababa taxi driver to take you to Ethio-China Friendship Road and he might just scratch his head.

The renaming of Wollo Sefer, one of the Ethiopian capital’s main thoroughfares, in tribute to the country’s burgeoning ties with Beijing might be obvious from the new street signs but it has yet to filter down to everyday use.

The road is not the only marker of China’s growing engagement with Ethiopia.

Addis Ababa’s ultramodern airport was built by the Chinese, as was the city’s ring road and flyover.

An extensive renovation of the African Union headquarters in downtown Addis is being financed by the Chinese to the tune of more than $100 million (€71 million).

Across the city, a Chinese government-built school, designed to cater for up to 3,000 students, offers Mandarin classes as part of its curriculum.

Scores of Ethiopians have been given scholarships to study subjects including engineering and architecture in China.

The Chinese restaurants and clinics advertising acupuncture and traditional herbal remedies that have become part of the landscape in almost every African city in recent years are here too. According to local media, some 1,000 Chinese companies operate in Ethiopia.

Besuited Chinese businessmen can be seen discussing deals in Addis hotel lobbies, while engineers and others fresh from working on road and telecommunications projects or building power stations and water supply systems haggle for souvenirs in the city’s sprawling Merkato before flying home to Beijing.

In some Ethiopian towns and villages, it is not uncommon for foreigners to find themselves being greeted by children yelling “China, China”.

Earlier this month Chen Deming, China’s minister for commerce, was in town predicting that trade volume between the two countries will reach $3 billion by 2015. Chinese investment in Ethiopia amounted to just under $1 billion last year, and there is much talk of future investment in agricultural projects.

“China and Ethiopia have been mutually supportive on the political front and closely co-operating on the economic front,” Chen said, going on to use the stock expression Chinese officials trot out when discussing relations with African states: “It is fair to regard the Sino-Ethiopian friendship as an all-weather one.”

China’s new engagement with Africa has played out very differently across the continent, helping revitalise moribund economies in some countries, while breeding resentment elsewhere due to support for unsavoury regimes, poor work practices and threatened local industries.

There have been a few cautionary tales for the Chinese along the way. In 2007, for example, nine Chinese oil workers were killed and seven briefly kidnapped in the restive Ogaden area of eastern Ethiopia.

Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi says African states must be prudent in setting the parameters of the relationship.

“The Chinese interest in Ethiopia has been nothing short of a godsend,” he tells The Irish Times.

“We have benefited massively from it, but like everything else it is capable of becoming a nightmare . . . It is up to the host countries as to how they use the available resources from the Chinese in the best possible manner. Those who do will benefit, those who don’t may not benefit as perhaps they ought to.”

China’s assistance in building infrastructure and its investment in manufacturing has been invaluable for Ethiopia, Meles says.

“We need investment from any quarter we can get it. The Chinese have been more aggressive in investing in Ethiopia than many others and our hope is that Chinese investment will entice not only additional Chinese investment but also investment from other countries.”

But, as in every African country wooing Beijing, there is debate over who stands to gain. A 2008 study by an economist at Addis Ababa University noted that while Ethiopian consumers will benefit from cheap Chinese imports, small local firms, particularly in the clothing and footwear sectors, will lose out.

Opposition figures, like many of their counterparts elsewhere in Africa, mutter darkly about deals agreed behind closed doors, and speculate on the motives of both the government and Beijing.

One told me he suspects that the Meles regime sees China’s overtures as an opportunity to shore up support where it matters on the world stage.

Whatever way the debate shifts, however, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the Chinese are here to stay.

-IrishTimes.com

Addis Ababa sells vast fertile swaths to international companies in effort to introduce large-scale commercial agriculture.

This is a country of the bent back and the silver sickle, where virtually all the crops have felt the calloused fingers of the peasant farmer working his tiny parcel of state-owned land. The ox pulls the plough and the donkey the cart, and fertiliser counts as agricultural technology.

Chugging into this picture on a bright green John Deere tractor came Hanumantha Rao, a former sugarcane farmer from India who is at the forefront of a revolution sweeping through Ethiopian farming. He hurried up to a hilltop on his company’s farm in Bako, four hours’ drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, and swept out an arm to indicate the land he has leased from the government: 11,000 hectares to grow rice, maize and oil palms.

In the fields below, boreholes were being sunk and roads graded. An airstrip will soon allow for a crop-spraying plane. Besides the new tractor Rao had been riding on that morning, there were 30 more on site. That was not many, he insisted, and neither was the farm especially large.

Further west in Gambella, Karuturi Global, the listed Indian horticulture company that employs Rao, is bringing in 1,000 new tractors to work the 300,000 hectares it has leased – making it one of the biggest farms in the Horn of Africa, if not the continent. “It is 120 kilometres [75 miles] wide,” Rao said proudly. “Three hours to cross by Jeep.”

Ethiopia’s great land lease project is moved swiftly ahead. In an effort to introduce large-scale commercial farming to the country, the government is offering up vast chunks of fertile farmland to local and foreign investors at almost giveaway rates. By 2013, 3m hectares of idle land is expected to have been allotted – equivalent to more than one fifth of the current land under cultivation in the country.

The move is part of a wider trend that has seen other African and Asian countries seek to take advantage of high global demand and the cost of crops by offering agricultural land to foreign companies, private equity funds and governments, particularly those of import-dependent Gulf countries.

If done properly, the investments have the potential to increase local food availability and create badly needed jobs. If not – as was the case with the attempt by the South Korean firm Daewoo to lease half of Madagascar’s arable land to grow corn for export in 2008, a deal many saw as 21st- century colonialism – they could prove disastrous.

In a food-insecure country such as Ethiopia, where several million people rely on food aid, the idea of offering fertile land to outsiders has raised concerns. But government officials point out that Ethiopia has vast reserves of underused land – 60m hectares of the country’s 74m hectares suitable for agriculture is not cultivated – and insist no local farmers will be adversely affected. Esayas Kebede, investment support co-ordinator at the agriculture ministry, said that foreign companies were essential for the move from subsistence to commercial farming, a key part of the country’s development strategy.

“There is no crop that won’t grow in Ethiopia but we cannot produce quantity and quality. Why? It’s a vicious cycle of the lack of capital and technology,” he said. “So leasing land is a real opportunity for us.”

So too for Karuturi. The Bangalore-based company, which is the world’s largest grower of roses, has negotiated an extraordinarily good deal with the government. For its farm in Bako, Karuturi is paying no rent for six years and then only 135 birr (£6.50) per hectare per year for the remainder of the 50-year lease. In Gambella, a remote and sparsely populated region close to Sudan, the rent is only 15 birr per hectare (73p).

The company believes the potential for large profits is so great that it plans to invest nearly $1bn in its Ethiopian agricultural operations, according to managing director Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi. Within eight years, he hopes to be producing 3m tonnes of cereals – mostly maize and rice – a year on the Gambella farm, as well as palm oil and sugar. Some of the produce will be sold in Sudan and Kenya – where the company is in talks with the US Agency for International Development to build grain silos at a border town. Like all the foreign land investors in Ethiopia, the company is free to export as much of its produce as it likes, but Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi said most would be sold domestically, where there is a ready market.

“Ethiopia is a food importer and will continue to be for some time. With the high cost of transportation in Africa, it does not make sense for us to try to export beyond the region.”

As with land, labour is also extremely cheap. The minimum wage in Ethiopia is about 8 birr (39p) a day. Karuturi, which hopes eventually to employ 20,000 people on its two farms, says it pays 10 birr (49p) a day and provides meals to its workers.

Rao, general manager of the Bako farm, said there was no shortage of locals desperate for jobs. “People here are very poor. They would work for 1 birr, and no one else pays more than 5 birr. So we are paying double.”

Outside the farm gates, the feeling about Karuturi among peasant farmers was mixed. The company’s 11,000 hectares were fallow before it arrived – the black clay soil is rich in nutrients but difficult to work without a mechanical plough – but some locals had grazed their cattle there and used to cross the farm to the nearest river, which is no longer possible.

Teresa Agassa, a 38-year-old man in gumboots who works a one-hectare plot, said it was good that some local people now had jobs – even if the wage was too small. But he spoke enviously of Karuturi’s tractors.

“They’re only for the company’s benefit. Maybe there can also be benefits for us – but we will only know in the future.”

Ethiopia’s farming revolution

In the late 1970s Ethiopia’s communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security. But the centralised tenure system has made it easy for the government to offer hundreds of idle farms to investors at cheap rates. A detailed database contains information on soil types, weather patterns, the nearest rivers, and suitable crops. The agriculture ministry is advertising 1.68 million hectares of land in the Benishangul-Gumuz, South Omo and Gambella regions. The greatest interest has come from India and Saudi Arabia, including Saudi Star Agricultural Development, which is growing 10,000 hectares of rice in Gambella. Firms from other Arab countries, and from China, Japan and the US have also expressed strong interest in leasing land.

China views Ethiopia as its major economic and trading partner in Africa, says Minister of Commerce Chen Deming on Monday.

The bilateral trade volume reached a historical high of 1.376 billion U.S. dollars during the first 11 months of last year, up 12.4 percent over the same period of the previous year, said Chen, adding that China’s imports from Ethiopia during that period rose 202 percent to over 200 million dollars.

During his talks with Sufian Ahmed, Ethiopia’s minister of finance and economic development, the Chinese minister said China’s investment in Ethiopia had accumulated to 138 million dollars in areas like textile, daily necessities, machinery, glass, building materials and leather.

By the end of November last year, Chinese firms in Ethiopia had accumulated a turnover of engineering contracts with nearly 4 billion dollars, said Chen, who arrived here on Monday for a two-day visit.

Chen put forward a four-point proposal on further development of bilateral trade and economic cooperation: First, further expanding its imports from Ethiopia through the use of tariff-free policies; Second, strengthening cooperation in investment and engineering contracts and continuing to encourage strong Chinese firms to invest in Ethiopia; Third, fully implementing the eight new measures to enhance cooperation with Africa; Fourth, further promoting cooperation in official development assistance to support Ethiopia’s infrastructure, and projects aimed to improve people’s well-being.

For his part, Sufian expressed his thanks for China’s long-term official development aid to Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian minister said trade deficit with China has improved significantly and China has become Ethiopia’s biggest trading partner.

Sufian spoke highly of China’s eight new measures to enhance cooperation with Africa, saying that Ethiopia would work together with China to fully implement the measures.

-Xinhua

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday held a telephone conversation with his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi on relations and major international issues of common concern.

The two leaders pledged to work together to push forward the new type of strategic partnership between China and Africa.

They also exchanged views on China-Africa cooperation, China-Ethiopia relations and climate change.

Source: Xiuanh

Prime Minster Meles Zenawi on Wednesday held discussion with Laureate Gebisa Ejeta, winner of the 2009 World Food Prize. Meles expressed happiness over the outstanding success of Prof. Gebisa and said that the prize is an honor and pride for Ethiopian researchers.

The premier confirmed that the government will provide the necessary support to Prof. Gebisa in his efforts to enhance the agriculture sector in Ethiopia. Prof. Gebisa on his part said the prize is a result of Ethiopian and African researchers.

He said Ethiopia, though a poor country, has allocated a significant amount of budget for the agricultural sector compared with other countries. However, he said a lot should be done in disseminating research outputs to farmers.

He also expressed commitment to serve his country as well as African farmers to change the livelihood of the farmers. Agriculture and Rural Development Minister, Tefera Deribew also said the premier discussed with prof. Gebissa on ways to disseminate research outputs and expand results of researches.

Earlier it was reported that the government has organized forum to enable Prof. Gebisa share experiences with young researchers as his outstanding achievement is exemplary. The Ethiopian geneticist and seed-breeder, who joined the Purdue University faculty in 1984, is only the second African to win the Food Prize.

He developed and introduced the first sorghum hybrid in Africa in the early 1980s, which was drought tolerant and produced significantly higher yields. Prof. Gebisa received MSc and PhD degrees from Purdue University in 1976 and 1978 respectively. (ENA)

- Foreign Policy

“Allowing skilled emigration is stealing human capital from poor countries.”

brain drain, does Africa suffer from one?

No. Many of the same countries courted by the United States through aid and trade deals complain bitterly of the “brain drain” of their doctors, scientists, and engineers to the United States and other rich countries. If correct, these complaints would mean that current immigration policy amounts to counterproductive foreign policy. Thankfully, however, the flow of skilled emigrants from poor to rich parties can actually benefit both parties.

This common idea that skilled emigration amounts to “stealing” requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled workers, a stock depleted by one for every departure. In fact, people respond to the incentives created by migration: Enormous numbers of skilled workers from developing countries have been induced to acquire their skills by the opportunity of high earnings abroad. This is why the Philippines, which sends more nurses abroad than any other developing country, still has more nurses per capita at home than Britain does. Recent research has also shown that a sudden, large increase in skilled emigration from a developing country to a skill-selective destination can cause a corresponding sudden increase in skill acquisition in the source country.

Second, believing that skilled emigration amounts to theft from the poor requires us to assume that skilled workers themselves are not poor. In Zambia, a nurse has to get by on less than $1,500 per year — measured at U.S. prices, not Zambian ones — and a doctor must make ends meet with less than $5,500 per year, again at U.S. prices. If these were your annual wages, facing U.S. price levels, you would likely consider yourself destitute. Third, believing that a person’s choice to emigrate constitutes “stealing” requires problematic assumptions about that person’s rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all people have an unqualified right to leave any country. Skilled migrants are not “owned” by their home countries, and should have the same rights to freedom of movement as professionals in rich countries.

“It’s a waste of money to train people who just plan to emigrate.”

Not really. The belief that skilled emigrants must cause public losses in the amount of their training cost is based on a series of stereotypes. First, large numbers of skilled emigrants are funded by themselves or by foreign scholarships. A survey of African-born members of the American Medical Association conducted by one of the authors found that about half of them acquired their medical training outside their country of birth. Second, many skilled emigrants serve the countries they come from for long periods before departure. The same survey found that African physicians in the United States and Canada who were trained in their country of birth spent, on average, over five years working in that country prior to emigration. This constitutes a substantial return on all investment in their training.

Third, there is the stereotype that skilled migrants send little money to their home countries, as they tend to come from elite families and bring their immediate families with them when they leave. But new research reveals this to be simply unfounded. Skilled migrants also tend to earn much more than unskilled migrants, and on balance this means that a university-educated migrant from a developing country sends more money home than an otherwise identical migrant with less education. The survey of African physicians mentioned above found that they typically send home much more money than it cost to train them, especially to the poorest countries. This means that for a typical African country as a whole, even if 100 percent of a physician’s training was publicly funded, the emigration of that physician is still a net plus.

Fourth, it is simply not true that all higher education in low-income countries must take place under massive public subsidy. When publicly subsidized higher education is the only way for someone who is not already wealthy to acquire higher education, that person’s emigration necessarily means that the subsidy emigrates too. But even in very low-income countries, there are alternative ways of financing higher education. One is to create ways for students to pay up front for their own training, as Makerere University in Uganda has done, but many African universities do not. Another is for the government to give student loans so that students can pay for their own training after the fact, which Kenya has done, but many African governments do not. Both of these break the necessary link between the departure of a worker and the departure of a public subsidy.

In the Philippines, training of the vast majority of nurses who leave the country is financed by the students themselves, the recruiters, or the foreign employers, not by the public; there is no reason whatsoever why similar professional schools could not be established throughout Africa.

“Skilled migrants who leave for a rich country never come back.”

False. A striking example comes from recent research in the Pacific, which has amongst the highest rates of skilled emigration globally. Consider Tonga, a small island nation with a population of only 100,000, where skilled workers might stereotypically be thought to have little incentive to go back. Even in this case, by age 35, just over a third of the nation’s academic brightest who had migrated after high school were already back working in Tonga. And in Papua New Guinea, half of the most academically skilled migrants had returned home by their early 30s.

In the United States, more than 20 percent of foreign students receiving Ph.D.s already have firm commitments to return to their home countries at the time of graduation, and many more will likely return in subsequent years. Of course there is large variation across countries: Migrants are much more likely to return to booming economies with good job prospects, as is seen by the flows of Indian tech workers back to India in the last decade. But even in cases where few migrants return, those that do may be particularly motivated by a desire to help their home country and may return to key leadership positions. One recent calculation finds that since 1950, 46 current and 165 former heads of government received their higher education in the United States.

“The emigration of doctors kills people in Africa.”

Hardly. Allowing or encouraging doctors to leave Africa for rich destination countries can reduce the number of doctors within the countries they come from, although even this is not clear if more people undertake medical training with the hope of migrating. However, the level of medical care provided by doctors in Africa depends on a vast array of factors that have little or nothing to do with international movement — such as scant wages in the public health service, poor or absent rural service incentives, few other performance incentives of any kind, a lack of adequate medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, a mismatch between medical training and the health problems of the poorest, weak transportation infrastructure, or abysmal sanitation systems.

To illustrate just one of these — the lack of rural service incentives — policies that limit international movement choices per se do not change the strong incentive for African physicians to concentrate in urban areas far from the least?served populations. Nairobi is home to just 8 percent of Kenya’s population, but 66 percent of its physicians. More Mozambican physicians live in the capital Maputo (51 percent) than in the entire rest of Mozambique, though Maputo comprises just 8 percent of the national population. Roughly half of Ethiopian physicians work in the capital Addis Ababa, where only one in 20 Ethiopians lives.

This and the many other barriers to domestic effectiveness of physicians may explain why, across 53 African countries, there is no relationship whatsoever between the departure of physicians or nurses and poor health statistics as measured by indicators such as child mortality or the percentage of births attended by modern health professionals. If anything, the relationship is positive: African countries with the largest number of their physicians residing abroad in the rich country are typically those with the lowest child mortality, and vice versa. This suggests that whatever is determining whether or not African children live or die, other factors besides international migration of physicians are vastly more important. Fiddling with immigration or recruitment policies of destination countries do precisely nothing to address those underlying problems.

“Skilled emigrants build trade and investment ties.”

Not always. Just as fears about possible negative effects of brain drain are typically overblown, so is the hype over the ability of countries to tap their diaspora to set up trade and investment. The well-known case of emigrants in Silicon Valley facilitating the growth of the Taiwanese, Chinese and Indian information technology industries is an important example demonstrating that high-skilled workers abroad can have transformative impacts on home country industry. But unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule.

In particular, skilled migrants from small islands and from sub-Saharan Africa, where highly skilled emigration rates are the highest, are not likely to be engaging in trade or investment. New surveys find that less than 5 percent of skilled migrants from Tonga, Micronesia and Ghana have ever helped a home country firm in a trade deal, and when they have, the amounts of such deals have been modest. Few migrants from these countries had made investments in their home countries — at most they had sent back amounts of US$2,000-3,000 to finance small enterprises.

However, skilled workers do engage with their home countries in a number of other ways apart from remittances. They can be an important source of tourism for their home countries; more than 500,000 visitors to the Dominican Republic each year are Dominicans living abroad. They are also tourism promoters: 60-80 percent of skilled migrants from four Pacific countries and Ghana advise others about traveling to their home countries. They indirectly spur trade, through consuming their home country’s products, and they transfer knowledge about study and work options abroad. The lack of involvement in trade and investment therefore largely reflects a lack of productive opportunities at home, not a lack of interest on the part of migrants in helping their home countries.

Conventional wisdom once held that the wealth of a country declined when it imported foreign goods, since obviously cash was wealth and obviously buying foreign goods sent cash abroad. Adam Smith argued that economic development — or the “wealth of nations” — depends not a country’s stock of cash but on structural changes that international exchange could encourage. In today’s information age, the view has taken hold that human capital now rules the wealth of nations, and that its departure in any circumstance must harm a country’s development. But economic development is much more complex than that.

But thanks to new research, we have learned that the international movement of educated people changes the incentives to acquire education, sends enormous quantities of money across borders, leads to movements back and forth, and can contribute to the spread of trade, investment, technology, and ideas. All of this fits very uncomfortably in a rhyming phrase like “brain drain,” a caricature that would be best discarded in favor of a richer view of the links between human movement and development.

fair trade

Blame famine on trade restrictions, not on climate change or a lack of Western aid.

Today is World Food Day and, once again, millions of people in East Africa are starving. Some have sought to turn this tragedy into opportunity. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi blames Western-induced climate change, and demands that rich countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide more aid. These views are echoed by the World Bank, Oxfam, Christian Aid and that bellwether of bad ideas, Gordon Brown. But such top-down solutions are doomed to failure. If Africans are to to weather their existing and future climates, the solutions must come from the bottom up.

Birhan Weldu became the poster child for famine in Africa 25 years ago. Then 3 years old, the image of the emaciated girl from the Ethiopian highlands appeared in newspapers across the world and was shown at a “Live Aid” event, viewed by over a billion people. A grown-up Ms. Weldu appeared at the “Live 8″ concert in 2005—as if demonstrating the success of the effort mounted by Sir Bob and his buddies.

Although thousands of individuals like Ms. Weldu have been saved by Western charity and taxes, millions more have suffered and died needlessly from famine in East Africa in the past quarter century. But their suffering was not caused by a lack of aid. Nor was it caused primarily by climate change (Western-induced or otherwise). Rather, it was and is the result of policies in the affected countries that inhibit freedom and incentives to trade, own land, and invest in diverse, prosperity-enhancing economic activities.

Before about 1800, famine was a common cause of death everywhere. The majority of the world’s population were subsistence farmers. When conditions were good, they produced enough to eat and a little more. When conditions were bad, they consumed their savings. If the bad conditions persisted, they died.

Then, first in England and soon in many other parts of the world, people began to rise above subsistence. They specialized more narrowly than before in the production of certain goods and they traded with others who also specialized. This led to increased output, as specialists were able to produce more than generalists. Competition in the supply of goods drove innovation, which led to further increases in output. Agricultural production rose dramatically and famine declined.

Two European famines of the nineteenth century stand out as exceptions: Ireland from 1845 to 1852, and Finland from 1866 to 1868. Both were the result of oppressive governments restricting the rights of individuals to own land and trade. In both countries, subsistence farming, combined with disease and bad weather, resulted in the death of many.

Since the 1920s, global deaths from drought-related famines have fallen by 99.9%. The reason? Continued specialization and trade, which has skyrocketed the amount of food produced per capita, and has enabled people in drought-prone regions to diversify and become less vulnerable.

In places where trade is restricted, people are forced to remain subsistence farmers. So, when drought occurs, the majority suffer and many die. The Indian drought of 1965 affected 100 million people, of which 1.5 million died. India subsequently liberalized and farmers adopted new technologies, notably high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice developed by Norman Borlaug, a truly deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the droughts of 1987 and 2002 affected three times as many people, there were only 300 reported deaths in 1987 and none in 2002.

The 1983 to 1985 famine in Ethiopia, which Ms. Weldu survived, was a direct result of then-President Mengistu Haile Miriam’s policies, which combined socialism with a violent resettlement program. Unable to trade, people engaged in subsistence agriculture. When drought struck in 1983, as it does periodically, millions were unable to obtain enough food. Aid flowed in from foreign governments and from naïve Westerners (including me, since I bought a couple of copies of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”), but much of it was requisitioned by the regime and used to oppress the very people it was supposed to help. Over a million died.

Mengistu continued to implement his socialist vision after the drought, forcing over 12 million people to live in essentially autarkic villages, promoting poverty and inhibiting adaptation. Ethiopia’s economy had been growing steadily until Mengistu came to power, with real per capita GDP rising by about 50% in the 20 years before 1973 (in spite of attempts by the government at planned agro-industrialization). But by the time he was eventually forced out of office in 1990, Ethiopia’s real per capita output was about 10% lower than in 1973.

Things did not change much during the 1990s, and GDP stagnated. Since coming to power in 1991, Mr. Zenawi has removed some trade restrictions and introduced a commodities exchange. As a result, the economy has grown rapidly. Yet state restrictions on ownership of land, and the government’s view that certain agricultural activities are essential, have undermined investment and prohibited the rural poor from fully participating in the economy. This means the recent drought has again hit the rural poor hardest, and left around 14 million people on the verge of starvation.

The pattern repeats across the continent. In the 1970s, Idi Amin murdered and exiled Uganda’s traders and nationalized many businesses. The country’s economy collapsed. When Yoweri Museveni came to power, he gradually liberalized the economy and it has since prospered. But in the northeast, government forces have clashed with the Lords Resistance Army and with so-called “warrior” pastoralists in Karamoja. Over two million people have been forced into subsistence farming, and are thus at the mercy of the variable climate.

Kenya’s economy has also grown rapidly for the past several years, as a result of economic liberalization. But large swathes remain subject to uncertain tenure rules, which make it more difficult to buy, sell or mortgage land, thus inhibiting agricultural improvement and diversification, and acting as barriers to trade. In such areas, tribal conflicts are more frequent, for in the absence of trade, warfare is the only way to improve one’s lot. Kenya’s land reforms of 2009 promise to exacerbate this situation by further undermining security of tenure.

The situation in Somalia is similar: Years of lawlessness and warfare have destroyed formal property rights and trade. As a consequence, about half of the population now faces the prospect of starvation.

Instead of carping about climate change and more aid, the World Bank, Western governments and all those charities in Africa should learn the lessons from one of this year’s economics Nobel laureates. Elinor Ostrom has spent a lifetime analyzing the ways in which humans devise institutions—from formal property rights to informal “rules of the game”—that let them solve their own problems. Her work emphasizes the need for such institutions to be built from the bottom up, without interference from higher levels of government.

Unfortunately, the West still incentivizes the political elite in Africa to impose rules from the top down, by providing “aid” that lets them ignore their citizens. Let’s stop “aiding” these kleptocrats with our taxes. Those leaders who genuinely want to govern will have to stop interfering, so their people can own property and trade.

By – JULIAN MORRIS

Birhan Woldu’s stark rebuke came 25 years to the day since Michael Buerk’s first television broadcasts showing the effects of a famine which went on to claim almost a million lives.

At the time, Miss Birhan was only three years old. Images of her starved body seemingly just hours from death helped jolt the world into one of its greatest ever acts of charity, which saved her life and millions more. But yesterday she and others who survived the 1984 famine called for urgent changes to the way international aid money is spent. “Twenty-five years ago, my life was saved by Irish nursing sisters who gave me an injection, and food from organisations like Band Aid,” she wrote in a new report from Oxfam charting better ways to use donations. “So it may seem strange for me to say now that to get food aid from overseas is not the best way. As well as being demeaning to our dignity, my education has taught me that constantly shipping food … is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency.” Mr Buerk’s reports, and others broadcast in Canada and the US, helped launch both the 1984 Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas and the Live Aid concert in 1985. More than £150 million was raised in what was the largest international aid appeal until the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But that model is now out-dated and fails adequately to fund simple schemes which could stop millions ever reaching the situation where they need hand-outs, Oxfam said. In its Band Aids and Beyond report yesterday, the agency said, “No longer should we be chasing each drought with food; we should be acting before the next drought comes”. Instead, donors should support programmes including weather early warning systems, improved roads, food and medicine stockpiles – cheaper than responding under the stress of urgent appeals – and irrigation schemes. Yet this year, more than 35 percent of Britain’s £154m aid to Ethiopia is to be spent on emergency assistance for the six million people facing starvation due to the current drought. A further 17 million people across Africa’s east and north-east are in need of food. Ethiopia’s own government yesterday appealed to Western donors for an extra £75m, despite being praised in recent years for efforts to prepare its citizens to cope with crises exacerbated by the changing climate. Sending such food aid “does save lives”, Oxfam said. But it is a “knee-jerk reaction” and “the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions which would break these cyclical and chronic crises”. “Donors need to shift their approach, and help to give communities the tools to tackle disasters before they strike,” said Penny Lawrence, Oxfam’s international director. “Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution. If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them.” Many people living in Makele, a town in northern Ethiopia close to the famine’s epicentre featured in Mr Buerk’s reports, are still haunted by the tragedy of a quarter-century ago. “Here we are not so badly hit by the current drought,” said Bisrat Mesfen, 30, who remembers as a five-year-old queuing for food handouts after his family’s livestock all died. “But we can be finished by the next one. Giving people food only when droughts come is too expensive and is the wrong way to spend that money.” -The Scotsman