It would be unfair if a barber’s son goes with a matted hair. By the same token, it would be unfair for Ethiopia that boasts surface and underground water as well as a vast land, suitable for irrigation and mechanized farming but which lies fallow, to grapple with food self-sufficiency challenges confronting citizens.
Ironically, many still lean on safety net program, in some parts of the country. The rest eke out a living from subsistence farming. Also, owing to its inaction in tapping the aforementioned resources, its export-eying-agro-processing industries, gaining in number, could thirst for much-needed inputs. This lapse could make the country’s transformation plan a pipedream.
Not only is that, smallholder farmers are not compensated for the drudgery on the farmland. If they engage in the production of commercial crops, their returns could turn handsome especially if they are assisted by mechanized farming. This as well could buttress the export trade on top of raising their living standards. Yet, tragic as it may sound, the country still practices a farming system that has not yet divorced itself from the one in Stone Age.
As a result, product and productivity have not yet got off the ground. Because of the aforementioned factors at force, the country, for long, has been forced to lean on foreign aid, loan and remittance. This trend is a formidable factor crippling the materialization of the economic structural change.
The land in the northern part of the country has been subject to constant tillage since the days of yore not to mention its being a place that entertained so many showdowns.
For lack of awareness, not much attention was given to natural resources. Owing to this, citizens’ appetite for destruction like felling trees was appalling. Here, it would not be hard to surmise what could be the repercussions. Rivers ran dry, while underground water suffers exhaustion. The flora and fauna could experience setbacks casting a shadow on the country’s biodiversity wealth. Drought would be imminent.
Luckily however, the situation is not irreversible as witnessed in Tigray State. Through physical and biological conservation works done there, it was made possible to resuscitate underground water and render the degraded land once more fecund.
Hence, pausing and pondering on irrigation has no option in turning around citizens’ life by reinforcing product and productivity.
To ensure economic structural change in Ethiopia, there is a need to place focus on agriculture to ensure protective market for farmers and to check the manufacturing sector is fed with ample inputs. There is also a call for warranting the birth of industrial parks is based on feasibility studies than equitable distribution for rhetoric purposes.
The Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that is gathering momentum, no doubt, plays quite a role in knowledge and technology transfer. The country has to press ahead with this.
The country must make a point of utilizing its human resource, capital and entrepreneurship. Absorbing the idle workforce in promising socioeconomic engagements, say skill production as per the available potential, is obligatory.
Every possible financial muscle must be able to irrigate young roots as well. Here, it is worth to note that improving income is one of the parameters of gauging growth.
Heeding those who have the knowledge to show ways of entrepreneurship than taking what politicians say as wholly true is advisable.
The country has to conduct research and come up with sufficient number of experts.
To sum up utilizing all potentials available for agriculture, coming up with export-oriented products, engaging the unemployed segment of society in its workforce and effectively utilizing financial resources down to the grassroots are must dos.
A change for the better in the lives of citizens must be evident across the board.
The Ethiopian Herald, August 18/2019
