Ethiopia has recorded one of its largest harvests in five years, after good rains, the UN said in a report on Wednesday.
However, the UNs Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) also noted that the 13 million tonne bumper harvest of cereals and pulses raised fears that crop prices could collapse, thereby adversely affecting rural farmers.
It added that providing farmers with seeds and fertiliser had helped boost the harvest, but that action to stabilise prices being affected by oversupply was now vital. The FAO accordingly called on the international community to use “local purchase as the main tool for securing cereals and pulses for food aid programmes” as a means of forestalling a collapse in prices.
– With a good overall harvest in prospect, and local surpluses in many areas of the country, there will be significant opportunities for local purchases during 2004, the report said.
– As such, the mission strongly recommends that donors and other organisations do their utmost to meet food aid needs, to the extent possible, through local purchases, added the report.
It went on to state that some 980.000 mt of food aid would be needed for 7,2 million people in 2004; half the quantity which had been required to combat the emergency in 2003, when 13 million people had been in need.
However, despite the good harvest, which is 46 percent up on last years, Ethiopia faces massive development problems, as illustrated by the fact that 5 million people each year still need food aid to survive.
Poor infrastructure means that food from breadbasket areas in western Ethiopia cannot reach eastern parts of the country, where many people remain hungry and dependent on aid.
The lingering impact of previous droughts and civil war that have plagued Ethiopia has left families still trapped in a cycle of dependency. Ever since the famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers needing emergency assistance have been increasing at alarming rates.
Aid agencies argue that the spiralling growth of the population, which has almost doubled in 20 years to 70 million, is hampering attempts to combat the ongoing food shortages.
Ethiopia is also strapped by massive debt, to service which last year took up 149 million dollars, which was more than that years entire health budget allocation.
Industry remains small in scale, although its input into the economy is growing. However, the governments Agricultural Development Led Industrialisation plan, which aims to bring about the industrialisation of agriculture, is being hampered by the population explosion, which is having the effect of reducing the size of land holdings and thereby tending to keep farming at the subsistence level.
The aggregate impact of these phenomena has been that the country has seen per capita income drop from 190 dollars in 1984 to a current low of 100 dollars, thereby reducing the effects of the efforts to fight poverty.
Aid agencies like Christian Aid argue that Ethiopias problem is a long-term one of chronic poverty, asset depletion and entitlement decline. This means that families, when hit by even the smallest droughts that reduce their harvests, have nothing to fall back on.
A government task force has been set up, called the Coalition for Food Security, to try and tackle the root causes of the continuing need for food aid. The 3,2 billion dollar five-year rescue plan aims to ensure that 15 million people will no longer have to live on hand-outs.
Kilde: FN-bureauet Irinnews
