Population, famine and fate in Ethiopia

v:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}

The Ethiopian government is authoritarian, but it isn’t incompetent. It gives fertilizer to farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 1990s the country was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years. So why are we back here again?

Infant deaths are already over two per 10,000 per day in Somali, the worst-hit region of Ethiopia. (Four per day counts as full-scale famine.) Country-wide, 20 percent of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign food aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. What have the Ethiopians done wrong?

The real answer is they have had too many babies. Ethiopia‘s population at the time of the last famine 25 years ago was 40 million. Now it is 80 million. You can do everything else right and if you don’t control the population, you’re spitting into the wind.

It is so obvious that this should be the start of every conversation about the country. Even if the coming famine in Ethiopia kills a million people, the population will keep growing. So the next famine, 10 or 15 years from now, will hit a country of a hundred million people, trying to make a living from farming on land where only 40 million faced starvation in the 1980s. It is going to get much uglier in Ethiopia.

Yet it’s taboo to say that. The question of population, instead of being central to the debate about development, food and climate change, has been put on ice. The reason is rich countries are secretly embarrassed, and poor countries are deeply resentful.

Source: The salt lake tribune