Foreign Aid/Self Help

Ethiopia is a dismally poor country ranking 174 out of 187 on the United Nations Human Development Index, where life expectancy sits at 58, where a 30% literacy rate prevails, and where a whopping 43% of the population is age fourteen and under.  Fully 14% of Ethiopia's gross national income results from foreign aid, and 7.4-million of its people are assisted by the country's own Productive Safety Net Program to stave off starvation.

Because most of the aid directed at Ethiopia has traditionally come from Western countries, there has been a Western influence on the government.  That's in the process of changing as Western governments cut back their foreign aid, in the face of their own weakening financial situation and fewer dollars targeting humanitarian aid to countries such as Ethiopia.

Foreign donors poured $3.5-billion into Ethiopia in 2010, with Canada ranking 8th for its $175.7-million aid administered by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).  The United States rendered $875-million, the World Bank/IDF $668-million, Britain $407-million, Global Fund $256-million, and the European Union $237-million.

But as Western sources of funding for Ethiopia and other aid recipients are tacked back, another source of aid has come to the fore - Asia.  China has churned up investment in African countries, along with India.  In fact, the influence of China on Ethiopia is growing in tandem with the waning influence of the West, as Western aid is pulled back and China's is growing.

The Ethiopian government's own Productive Safety Net Program actively creates public work projects for the purpose of aiding over seven million of its people to exchange food or the cash to buy it for public work projects; road repairs, terracing and replacing eroded hillsides, whatever needs to be done.  Food aid is not available without recipients earning it through work exchange.

Development experts are of the opinion that the country is not engaged in making full use of its productive land.  Of its 1.2-million square kilometres, 750,000 kilometres represents arable land, yet a mere 150,000 square kilometres is under cultivation.  The source of the Nile is in Ethiopia, considered to be the 'water tower' of Africa.  Climate change has already impacted the region with less moisture falling as rain, creating regional drought situations.

But land ownership is not practised; rather it is communal, reflecting a communist ideology.  Farming plots are rotated every few years, so farmers have no incentive to improve the plots since there is no urge to make improvements on what one doesn't personally own.  The lessons of failure of collective farming in the former Soviet Union do not seem to have influenced the Government of Ethiopia.

"Ethiopians don't feel part of the solution.  The state has always been the source of their livelihood", explained Nicolas Moyer of the Humanitarian Coalition, a network of five major Canadian aid and development agencies working in Ethiopia and world-wide.  The large and growing population of the country has no vision of control over their future.

The regime is a repressive one; journalists and opposition political movements are often imprisoned.  Mass relocation of tens of thousands of its people occur to vacate land so that Chinese and Indian companies can set up their own huge commercial farms for the production of export crops to feed their own populations.  (A reflection of China's penchant for re-locating huge masses of its population for example, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.)

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, head of the current government, has modelled the country on the highly successful, but controlled state capitalism now practised by China, which is also its largest trading partner.  Ethiopia is a huge experiment in a controlled economy in a developing country struggling to lift itself out of endemic poverty.

Its large youth demographic may be a factor in its favour.  The withdrawal of foreign aid from Western sources, including Canada, which has recently announced it plans to cut back on its foreign aid to a number of traditional aid recipients, including Ethiopia, and peculiarly enough, China as well, will doubtless act as an impetus for the two countries to form even firmer bonds.

On the other hand, the Ethiopian government itself stated that it plans to be free of foreign food aid by 2015; this merely hastens the process.