Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has continued to face a number of interlocking challenges that were triggered by wrong policy options, climate change which seriously affected the entire livelihood of the population. Besides, farmers with archaic agricultural implements are still feeding the major portion of the country’s population on patched lands, under developed water and forest resources that underpinned the country’s agriculture.
The Ministry of Agriculture was one of the earliest ministries established in a post war era to ensure the modernization of Ethiopia’s agricultural system. In 1953, Ethiopia entered into comprehensive development assistance program with the USA with the vision of making the country a breadbasket of Africa; various agricultural programs like EPID were launched while regional agricultural development programs like CADU, WADU were commissioned to modernize Ethiopia’s agriculture. Despite these grandeur programs and a series of five years plans by the imperial regime and claims by the Derge for a green campaign, the country has never been able to fully feed itself and regrettably remained a recipient of foreign food aid for decades.
Over the last 28 years, we have been hearing flowery reports on our successive double digit economic growth, whatever that means! But no serious progress is in sight particularly in the agriculture sector.
Now, Ethiopia is alarmingly dipped into multiple jeopardy of food insecurity, climate change induced recurrent drought, rampage of locust and now COVID-19. Although the country could have benefited from the export of coffee, oil seeds, leather, cut flowers and other agricultural commodities, the nation is still entangled with shortfalls in the export sector and contraband that has continued unabated.
The current situation is far more complicated by the advent of COVID-19. Official government data indicated two versions of information in which COVID-19 could be responsible for shrinking of the economy from 5-6 percent while the latest information puts it at 3 per cent. Part of this is may attributed to the possible down turn in the agriculture sector.
The leadership of this country is leaving no stone upturned to seek a comprehensive strategy to absorb the negative effects of the pandemic. All sectors are mobilizing their staff and resources to contain the virus while the public is already making history in an unprecedented philanthropic campaign while still remaining defiant to adhere to the provisos of the proclamation of the state of emergency and the corresponding guidelines.
The agriculture sector is expected to be the pace setter in the battle. The nation depends on the sector for crop and livestock production, export, provision of raw materials for industries and deliveries for parts of the service sector.
At this point in time, the rapid proliferation of COVID-19 demands the highest efficiency and total mobilization in our agricultural development. This would mean urgent provision of agricultural inputs to farmers, development of new small scale household and community managed irrigation schemes, ensuring the diversification of agriculture products with emphasis on crops that would ripe in a short period of time to effectively shorten food stress season.
The peoples and government of Ethiopia should not allow COVID-19 to outpace our development programs particularly in the agriculture sector. This would imply the development of emergency agricultural program focusing on crop production in the rural areas benefiting farmers and promoting extensive and urgent urban agricultural development programs that could focus on vegetable gardening employing modern technologies that could help families to grow various types of vegetables.
The youth can benefit from urban agriculture schemes. All kebeles in the cities and towns across the country can develop gardens that could replace areas where trash is carelessly dumped becoming a breeding ground for COVID-19.
Planned and coordinated activities and joint programs that could involve the Ministry of Finance, Health, Planning Commission, and Agricultural Research Institute, Bio-diversity Institute, export promotion Agency, Investment Commssion, universities and research institutes need to focus on rapidly enhancing production and productivity at the national level.
Control on the prices of food items is a critical factor for winning the battle against the pandemic. Let me give my readers a simple illustration, in 1984, at the peak of the famine in the country, here in Addis Ababa the government has been providing 8 pieces of injerra for 1 Birr but today in my own community it is the reverse, one enjerra for 8 Birr, isn’t this incredible!
Private sector investment in agriculture is not developing while licenses are withdrawn from investors who never developed thousands of hectares of land they have received.
All told, I think that programs in the Ministry of Agriculture although commendable, wide and comprehensive are not going far enough to effectively resist the menace of the pandemic as their programs primary focus on the usual business style conducted under normal circumstances. The country needs urgent response from the sector and all involved need to give in their hands unless we dare to face the dire consequences of possible lockdowns as is the case in some African countries.
The Ethiopian Herald April 25/2020
BY SOLOMON DIBABA
