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| liben |
 Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:51 pm |
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Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 40
Location: University of Chicago
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GETZ #6–SEW BEZA YE-REHAB NEGER BEZA:
MORE PEOPLE MORE HUNGER
Donald N. Levine
Famine is a visible horror. . . . Witness the agony, degradation, hopelessness and silent anger on the dismal and skeletal faces. . . faith for survival while in the agony of slow and grinding teeth of famine. . .the slender and uncontrollable hope for miraculous succour in the face of pious indifference. . . . Nothing else manifests man’s inhumanity to man more than famine. –Mesfin Wolde Mariam
Traveling north to Aksum and Adwa and south to Awassa I was struck by two things, the wan landscape and the swarms of people. The Awassa road, not so long ago lined with trees, appears bare savannah now. Formerly tiny towns had turned into sprawling urban centers. It made me think.
On return I studied up on food insecurity in a course on World Hunger co-taught with biologist Jocelyn Malamy. This made me more aware than ever of the close ties among population growth, deforestation, and food insecurity–and gave me a sense of responsibility to share that awareness with any reader who would engage the issue. Conveniently, one of my readers did so. Consider the response to Getz #4 sent by Ato Zinah Minyehal:
Professor Levine,
Why is population increase for Ethiopia such a concern? There are many countries with higher density of population than Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s problem is the dysfunctional political system, not the population. When democracy takes hold, the country will certainly prosper. I strongly disagree with the premise that population growth is a problem by itself. . .
Ato Zinah’s point of view represents the views of many Ethiopians I know. But I disagree, and in response, let me share some uncomfortable facts.
Some 85% of Ethiopia’s people still live in the rural sector. By itself, population growth automatically increases food insecurity among them. Can there be any doubt that malnutrition, hunger, and famine comprise a major challenge to Ethiopia in its foreseeable future? To take the most extreme of these afflictions: although famines have been reported in Ethiopia for nearly as long as we have records, averaging one famine every fifteen to twenty years between 1500 and 1940, in the last fifty years famines have occurred with increasing severity and frequency, averaging one every seven years. Recall: 1959; 1973-4; 1985; 1995; 2003; 2006.
Poverty is a major cause of these famines. At times when production is ruined from natural hazards–drought, locusts, excessive rainfall–impoverished farmers and pastoralists have no reserves and no cash with which to secure food. As Mesfin Wolde Mariam demonstrated in Rural Vulnerability to Famine in Ethiopia, subsistence rather than commercial farming is the condition of famine in rural Ethiopia. Given that rural Ethiopians live in a subsistence economy, it follows that rapid population growth renders them more vulnerable to hunger, disease, and famine. Two million more infants per year means two million more mouths to feed, two million more children to school in a severely impoverished system. Increased family size means decreased size of food portions and declining nutrition. Malnutrition has already reached the point, UNICEF reports, where 47% of children under five are underweight, and more than half are stunted. Chronic hunger and intermittent famines require substantial relief aid. That heavily burdens the state, donors, and NGOs, diverting resources that might otherwise go to education, health, reforestation, crop improvement, soil restoration, water-harvesting technology, agricultural research, and improved farming technology.
Larger families diminish agricultural output, since all land that is physically cultivable is now cultivated. Larger families result in smaller farming plots, which means less food production per family for each new generation. Land units formerly measured by the gash are now measured in hectares. Land use demands created by larger families cause subsistence farmers to overuse their land, thereby ceasing crop rotation and degrading the soil. Over four per cent of the country’s arable land has already lost its ability to support crops, according to Ethiopian environmental scientists.
Increased population also exacerbates one of Ethiopia’s most alarming, if largely ignored, problems–deforestation. More rural people require more land for farming and grazing and more timber for construction and firewood. Over the past thirty years, population pressures have led to a 70% reduction in forestland in Ethiopia. This leaves only 3% of the country’s forests still standing in a land where some 4/5 of the people depend entirely on wood for essential energy needs. What is more, deforestation wrecks havoc on the quality of topsoil. Lack of trees to facilitate the underground collection of water produces rock-hard soil, which does not absorb rain and instead promotes crop-destroying floods. Floods also sweep away the nutrient-rich topsoil, leaving farmers with a dry and infertile substratum. The soil degradation due to erosion issues in massive drops in food production. High population densities also cause degradation of water resources.
Such dynamics appear to some extent in countries all over the world.
Demographers project an increase of 2.6 billion people by 2050 living on roughly the same amount of arable land. But the cycle of poverty, hunger, and disease in which millions of Ethiopians are trapped makes these factors affect Ethiopia to an extreme degree. And they threaten to grow worse, much worse, if present population trends persist. Consider projections provided by Daniel Assefa of the Ethiopian Economics Association in his penetrating analysis of the dimensions and impacts of Ethiopia’s demographic explosion. He calculates that Ethiopia’s current Total Fertility Rate (TFR = births per woman per lifetime) of 5.9 would produce a total population of about 325 million by the year 2050. This means that an area of farmland that hosted about 44 persons in 1995 and about 65 today would have to supply food for 300. Keeping to its current exceptionally high birth rate means nothing but catastrophe in Ethiopia’s future. At that rate, in ten years the population of childbearing age will have increased to the point that huge continuing population increases will be inevitable.
And yet, solutions to this crisis are not overwhelmingly difficult. Education is a major key, especially for women. Keeping girls in school longer will postpone the age at which they begin to bear children. Education empowers them to consider the advantages of smaller families and to learn about family planning. In addition, raising the age at which girls become sexually active lowers their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS infection and helps them withstand the pressure to enter the growing prostitution industry. To be sure, additional schooling is expensive and not quickly instituted. Family planning services delivered efficiently to all women of reproductive health and in particular to those who are married would likely have a powerful effect in a fairly short time.
In his report on population and environment in Ethiopia published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Sahlu Haile rightly affirms that no population program has succeeded without strong and proactive support from national governments. Whatever the political system, this critical area can be dealt with. For example, Iran is viewed as a success story for reducing population growth dramatically by means that are universally applicable. In the decade after 1976, Iran’s population increased by 50 percent; at that rate of growth Iran's population would have reached 108 million by 2006. But through a variety of methods–dropping maternity benefits for couples with more than three children, requiring men and women to attend classes about contraception before obtaining a marriage license, and making both condoms and contraceptive pills widely available, even giving away condoms at health clinics–the government of Iran managed to check population growth to reach only 71 million this year. Iran’s TFR started at Ethiopia’s current level of around 6, and then dropped to below 2!
Ethiopia's government has done relatively little to deliver the message about family planning. Although some of her ministers realize the importance of this problem, the government has addressed it so ineffectually that dramatic changes are needed to deliver incentives to engage in family planning. Ato Daniel would expand the circle of agents to include private groups, NGOs, and the public at large as well as government agencies. To that, Dr. Ghelawdewos Araia has written in Combating Future Famines in Ethiopia, the conquest of famine in Ethiopia is a “mammoth historical task,” requiring action on many fronts, and should not be left to the homeland authorities alone: “The Ethiopian intellectual and professional in the Diaspora must be willing to contribute.”
Population growth and environmental degradation present the two most critical challenges that face this generation of Ethiopians. They constitute a common ground on which all Ethiopians can congregate. This common purpose can best be served by a robustly democratizing process, which supports a framework within which differences can be resolved nonviolently; which supports media that can freely report successes and shortcomings of initiatives; and which enhances communication that can facilitate all development undertakings.
Of course, many factors beside population growth contribute to chronic hunger and vulnerability to famine. But that is a big one. Can it be controlled? Only if more Ethiopians become concerned, and if all concerned demonstrate a commitment to “deny famine a future in Ethiopia” in Dr. Gheladawdewos’s stirring phrase. And, may I add, if we move to take action before it is too late. |
Last edited by liben on Sun May 27, 2007 3:27 am; edited 2 times in total |
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| hslewis |
| Posted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 4:59 am |
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Joined: 14 Jun 2006
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Location: Madison, Wisconsin
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I must agree with Liben's warnings regarding the dangers of such extraordinary and unchecked population growth. To add my personal observation and response to Liben's extensive argument, I was deeply concerned, even shocked, on my last visits, 1991 and 1993, at the very obvious growth of the population over the decades since my first stay in Ethiopia in 1958-60.
I felt this most immediately and disturbingly in Jimma, in the neighborhood in which we had lived in 1959, not far from the Jimma Agricultural and Training School (as it was then called). In June, 1991, it was impossible for this ferenji to walk for more than 20 meters or so having dozens of children, perhaps 4 to 10 years old, swarming around me. Each time I was shoo a group off, as I had to do in order to continue, another such swarm would form just a few steps down the path. We had never experienced anything remotely like this when we lived there 32 years earlier.
It also seemed evident to me that the trees and ground cover on the route from Addis to Ambo, in 1993, was far sparser than it had been in 1965-66. How can it not be, when it must provide fuel and building materials and so much more for so many more inhabitants?
Herb Lewis |
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| Costantinos |
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 3:17 pm |
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Joined: 31 Mar 2006
Posts: 12
Location: Addis Ababa
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Dear Liben Gebre Etyiopia
Thank you for raidsing yet another importnat subject that has been neglected for so long in Ethiopia. Indeed population studies yield knowledge important for planning, particularly by governments, in fields such as health, education, housing, social security, employment, and environmental pres-ervation. Such studies also provide information needed to formulate government population poli-cies, which seek to modify demographic trends in order to achieve economic and social objec-tives. Demography is an interdisciplinary field involving mathematics and statistics, biology, medicine, sociology, economics, history, geography, and anthropology. The field of demography has a relatively brief history. Its beginning often is dated from the publication in 1798 of An Essay on the Principle of Population by the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus. In this work Malthus warned of the constant tendency for human population growth to outstrip food produc-tion and classified the various ways that such growth would, in consequence, be slowed. He distinguished between “positive checks” to population growth (such as war, famine, and disease) and “preventive checks”.
The development of demography has been tied closely to the gradually increasing availability of data on births and deaths from parish and civil registers and on popu-lation size and composition from the censuses that became common in the 19th century. The growth of behavioural sciences in the 20th century and advances in the fields of statistics and computer sciences further stimulated demographic research. Subfields of mathematical, economic, and social demography have grown rapidly in recent decades.
The Ethiopian Population Supporting Capacity Assessment Study (PSC) of 1988 shows that even us-ing the "achievable optimum" model with all interventions, no improvement is observed in the supporting capacity of districts that have already reached the critical class. Thus the situation can only be saved through population redistribution. On the other hand, intervention will have signifi-cant impact on those districts that are under capacity, acceptable and marginal Population Sup-porting Capacity.
The model depends on productivity and amount of potentially available and non-arable land "available to meet the crop, fuel wood and livestock requirements of the population." The analy-sis is done on a country-wide basis focusing on the districts level of administration. The Popula-tion Supporting Capacity of any districts depends on physical resources to meet the districts food requirement of 162.6 kg. of grain-equivalent per person per annum; feed requirement of 2280 kg. of dry feed per head per annum and fuel wood requirement of 1.3 cubic metres per capita per an-num. It was found out that most districts are not in a position to meet these requirements and critical situations have prevailed in most of them. The Population Supporting Capacity models in-volve seven different types of interventions over the period of time under consideration. The ag-gregate of the sub-models known as "achievable optimum", measures the combined effect of in-terventions. Here are the projections base on a 1985 - 2010 Population Supporting Capacity by districts Base Model
1985 - under capacity +50 to 100% Districts: Raya and Azebo Dollo, Wabe, Shire, Merhabete, Wag, Borena Metekel, Mendeyo Genale, 1985 - acceptable +20 to +50 % Districts: Tembein, Menz Yifat
1985 - marginal +20 to -20 % Districts: Enderta, Axum, Lasta, Gambella
1985 - Overcapacity 20 to -100 % Districts: Adowa, Agame, Raya & Kobbo, Borena, Wereilu
1985 – critical Districts: Kilte Awlalo, Yeju, Kalu, Were Himeno, Wadla Delanta, Awssa, Dessie Zuria
1995 - under capacity +50 to 100% Districts: Dollo Wabe, Mendeyo, Merhabete, Borena
1995 - acceptable +20 to +50 % Districts: Tembein, Shire, Wag, Raya & Azebo, Tegulet, Metekel, Elkere, Assosa
1995 - marginal +20 to -20 % Districts: Menz, Yefat Elkere
1995 – Overcapacity 20 to -100 % Districts: Enderta, Adowa, Axum, Raya & Kobbo, Borena, Lasta, Gambella
1995 – critical Districts: Kilte Awlalo, Agame, Yeju, Ambassel, Dessie Zuria, Awssa, Kalu, W.Himenu, W. Delanta, Wereilu,
2010 – under capacity +50 to 100% Districts: Dolo, Wabe, Borena, Mendayo
2010 – acceptable +20 to +50 % Districts: Merhabete
2010 – marginal +20 to -20 % Districts: Tembein, Shire, Wag, Raya & Azebo, Metekel, Assosa
2010 – Overcapacity 20 to -100 % Districts: Lasta, Borena, Menz, Yifat, Tegulet, Gambella, Elkere
2010 – critical Districts: Enderta, Kilte Awlalo, Agame, Adowa, Axum, Raya & Kobo, Yeju, Kalu, Ambassel, Dessie Zuria, Were Himenu, Wadla Delanta, Tegulet, Wereilu, Awssa
Source: Master Land Use Plan, Ethiopia, PSC Assessment FAO, 1988.
Indeed by these estimates, already Enderta, Adowa, Axum, Raya & Kobbo, Borena, Lasta, Gambella, Kilte Awlalo, Agame, Yeju, Ambassel, Dessie Zuria, Awssa, Kalu, W.Himenu, W. Delanta, Wereilu, are crtically popuklated where the resourses cannot support human life in current production norms.... |
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