BY GETACHEW MINAS
Natural resources are deeply affected by migration. Mostly, people leave the rural area and migrate to the urban centers. There are several reasons for that, such push and pull factors. The push factors “drive” the people out of the rural land, while the pull factors “attract” them to the urban centers. These factors are directly linked with economic and non-economic aspects that engulf the lives of people in their place of residence. Migrants may leave their place of origin due to conflict, famine, shortage of land, crop failure, lack of family support and rural employment opportunities.
Studies show that the push factors are stronger than the pull factors in the developing countries. Rural people totally depend on agriculture and livestock. With increasing rural population, the productivity of land declines. Output per unit of land declines and it fails to support the rural people. The rural land becomes eroded, deprived of vegetation due to shortage of rainfall. The rural people face shortage of water to support themselves and their livestock. Thus, the environment becomes non-conducive for maintaining the livelihood of the peasants. This forces the people to leave the rural area and migrate to the cities to support their livelihoods.
Labor Force Surveys reveal that one of the reasons for migration is lack of job opportunities in the rural areas. People migrate to the next town looking for jobs. If they fail to be engaged there, they move to the capital city, believing it is the major provider of jobs. Here rural migrants engage in construction works as daily laborers with meager income to live on. This subsistence income becomes attractive to those who stayed back in the rural area.
These ones also follow the same route to the urban centers. The young rural males, with or without basic education, are the ones who look for urban employment. In the case of young rural females, they face the added push factor of marital problems, such as early marriage that drives them out of the rural setting to the urban one. Where they fail to find urban jobs, they engage in the construction sector or in the service sector mainly tending bars.
The push factors overweigh the pull factors in the developing countries. In Africa, economic factors such as the decline in agricultural productivity, rural unemployment and unproductive traditional farming pushed out the people from their rural residence to the urban cities in search of better living standard and living condition. Apart from conflict in the rural areas, shortage of land due to over-population, land degradation, inappropriate land polices and regulation, natural resources depletion and ecological degradation result in food scarcity. All these cause rural famine, which resulted in migration from rural to urban areas.
The pull factor is related to the place where a person migrates. It attracts people to a certain place, usually to the urban cities. Some scholars consider it as a right of mobility of the young who seeking for better opportunity in the cities. They believe that there is a good opportunity of access to employment, high standard of living, and social services such as health, education, water, electricity, housing, telecom, and urban recreational centers. However, the strongest attractions are relatives who reside in urban areas. Access to information facilitates the rural urban migration. The types of sources of information range from individual to mass media.
Migration has its own positive and negative effects in the areas of origin and destination. As mentioned earlier, at the point of origin, the push factors are natural resources depletion, environmental pollution, earning disparities and redundant labor. Urban social unrest and high population density are some of the negative effects of migration. Dang et.al pointed out the positive contribution of migration. This includes development, industrialization, income generation, remittance with foreign exchange earnings, and rising income of the family back home. Thus, migrants help reduce poverty of the family in the country of origin, thereby raising the national income of their country.
Migration to urban centers depletes the rural area of its young and productive labor force. The elders that stay in the rural area lose the support they used to get from their children. These young people used to support their families in agricultural activities such as land preparation, composting, farming, planting or sowing seeds, weeding, harvesting, grain collection, marketing, and other services. Elderly rural people are deprived of the assistance they used to have from their offspring, progenies and descendants, who migrate to the cities. Of course, these migrants support their rural families with money transfers or provide them with resources, clothes, and tools while visiting them during holidays.
Studies show that migration roughly reflects the age and sex composition of population. The age of migrants is less than the dwellers at the place of destination. This implies that migrants are generally the young people of the society. In other words, the rural society is deprived of its productive labor force due to migration. Thus, migrants affect both the place of origin and destination. Apart from migration, socioeconomic changes have been effected by fertility, mortality, labor force entry into and exit from economic activities, and school attendance all bring changes on human resources development and utilization.
Africans, including Ethiopians, have faced both the negative and positive consequences of internal and international migration. Ethiopian workers, particularly young women, who migrate to the Middle-East, have been subjected to slave-labor, with or without pay. They lose their lives while working day and night without rest.
The working conditions are horrible, particularly for young women, who sweated to death only to support their poor parents back home. The Government of PM Abiy Ahmed has performed exemplar work in returning these citizens back home to join their families. They would work and earn more in their own country and support their families, enjoying the environment, resources, people and family around them.
The Ethiopian Herald 10 January 2021
