Posts filed under ‘Climate Change’
Ethiopia’s Journey From Poverty to Prosperity
By Haddis Tadesse
The walia is a species of ibex found only in northern Ethiopia. Some 40 years ago, with fewer than 200 left, the walia was in danger of extinction. It remains an endangered species, but through conservation measures, numbers are increasing. Things are getting better.
The development of the walia’s home country – Ethiopia – is even most robust. As leaders from around the world gather in Cape Town, South Africa, for the World Economic Forum on Africa, they will be talking not about the wali but about countries like Ethiopia, and comparing notes on the challenges and opportunities they represent.
I left Ethiopia in the late 1980s as the country was gripped by a civil war. I returned one year ago as the representative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation based in Addis Ababa. The progress the country is making is evident. The number of children dying in Ethiopia has been reduced by over 60% between the time I left the country and today, with the situation continuing to improve.
As Bill Gates noted in his Annual Letter this year, “Today, Ethiopia has more than 15,000 health posts delivering primary health care to the farthest reaches of this rural county of 85 million.” Using the Millennium Development Goals as a measure, Ethiopia is on its way to meeting most of them by 2015.
The country’s economic growth has also been impressive. In the last decade or so, Ethiopia’s growth has been among the strongest in the world, partially due to better policies, increased productivity and an increase of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI); private equity players are also increasingly active in Addis, while local entrepreneurs are expanding their operations.
In addition to this, the biggest change I have witnessed since my return may very well be that government, donors, the private sector and the public in general have realised that growth and prosperity can be achieved if the right policies and implementation strategy are put in place.
The country is no longer paralyzed by the complexity of challenges. This mental shift from “we can’t” to “we can” has dared a nation to dream big; to become food secure in a few years’ time, to build the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, and a new, robust, electrified railway system of 4,744 kilometers, to create light manufacturing industrial zones. Also, the significant improvements in the outcomes in the health and education sectors are critical to building a prosperous nation.
Ethiopia now knows it does not have to reinvent the wheel in its quest for prosperity. Looking to countries like India, Malaysia, China, Brazil, Turkey and others, Ethiopia can find successful models of newly industrialized economies that sustain impressive GDP growth over decades. Ethiopia is well positioned to escape the poverty trap. But it won’t be easy. Fundamental challenges to infrastructure, human and financial capital and the market need to be carefully addressed.
If we can bring the walia back from near-extinction, we certainly can build on the immense progress this nation has made and improve the health and lives of all people living in Ethiopia.
Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics
Ethiopia has been deemed a population-climate “hotspot” – a place where rapid growth and a changing climate pose grave threats to food security and human well-being.
By Laurie Mazur for the Wilson Center
Certainly, the landlocked East African nation faces outsized challenges. One in ten Ethiopians is chronically food insecure, and nearly one in five go hungry in drought years. With almost half its people under the age of 15 and an average fertility rate of nearly five children per woman, Ethiopia’s population is the fifth fastest-growing in the world.
Given these challenges, does continued rapid population growth consign impoverished Ethiopians to chronic hunger? Some, in the spirit of Thomas Robert Malthus, would answer yes. Malthus famously argued in the 19th century that human numbers would inevitably outstrip food supply, because population grows geometrically while food supply can only increase arithmetically. Others, inspired by Ester Boserup, contend the opposite is true: population growth spurs invention that keeps supply ahead of demand.
A closer look at Ethiopia shows that neither the Malthusians nor the Boserupians quite get it right. The connections between population and food security are extraordinarily complex. Numbers matter, but so do other dynamics, such as migration and age structure. And context is paramount: the right policies are essential to encouraging – and reaping the benefits from – positive demographic trends, but those policies must be tailored to local circumstances.
Contrasts and Contradictions
Ethiopia is a land of stunning contrasts and seemingly contradictory truths.
Most Ethiopians live in brutal poverty, their per capita income among the lowest in the world. And yet, Ethiopia is one of the so-called “African lions:” its economy grew at a brisk 7.5 percent last year, more than twice the rate of emerging economies as a whole.
Ethiopia is a nation where small farmers struggle to eke out a living on tiny, degraded plots of land: in the densely populated highlands, roughly half the land is significantly eroded. Yet Ethiopia is also the target of aggressive “land grabs.” Since 2008, the government has leased or sold nearly 10 million acres of prime farmland in the less-populated lowlands to investors from China, India, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, according to Human Rights Watch.
How do we reconcile these contrasts?
First, national averages are of limited use in a country like Ethiopia, with its diverse topography and staggering inequities. Geographically, Ethiopia’s regions are as distinct as, say, Arizona and Minnesota – and the outlook for environmental quality and food security vary accordingly. There are also huge disparities between rural and urban Ethiopians. To understand the relationship between population dynamics and food security, then, it is helpful to remember that there are many Ethiopias.
It is also helpful to set aside any preconceived notions about population and food.
Malthusians argue that population growth inevitably leads to hunger, as the resource “pie” is divided into ever smaller slices. The most obvious flaw in this theory is that technology has thus far allowed the size of the pie to increase. Another is that food and other resources are not distributed equitably; some people get much larger servings than others. The pie as a whole may be big enough for everyone, but only the slices of the poor continue to shrink.
The Malthusian narrative doesn’t fit Ethiopia, where the areas with the highest population densities are not usually the hungriest. In The Demographic Transition and Development in Africa: the Unique Case of Ethiopia, Charles Teller found that “high density can either increase vulnerability or strengthen resilience,” depending on a host of other factors, including technology, infrastructure, education, urbanization, and effective implementation of population and development policy.
On the other hand, Boserupians would contend that population growth can actually diminish hunger, by forcing societies to modernize agriculture and improve productivity. But realities on the ground in Ethiopia don’t fit that narrative, either.
Tewodaj Mogues of the International Food Policy Research Institute said in an email, “The [Ethiopian] government’s various attempts at increasing agricultural intensification have not been very successful, therefore continued population growth creates substantial pressure on the land, especially in Ethiopia’s northern highlands.”
Of course, agriculture is modernizing in Ethiopia, but the benefits don’t necessarily accrue to the nation’s hungry. In the western lowlands, where land grabs are underway, tens of thousands of small farmers have been removed from their land to make way for agribusiness. According to Oxfam International, Ethiopia now supports the export of fruit, vegetables, and flowers worth $220 million a year. Those exports boost the nation’s foreign exchange, but they may also undercut the food security of poor farmers and reduce production for the domestic market. One displaced farmer told Human Rights Watch, “We want you to be clear that the government brought us here…to die….They brought us no food, they gave away our land to the foreigners so we can’t even move back.”
Beyond Malthus and Boserup
If the Malthusian and Boserupian explanations fall short, what are the root causes of hunger in Ethiopia, and how might they be addressed?
Mogues cited several “deep determinants” of hunger, including geography (for example, rugged mountainous terrain and a changing climate) and institutions (a broad term that includes the rule of law, governance, policies, investments and property rights). Many small farmers in Ethiopia lack secure land tenure, for example, which removes incentives to improve the land and discourages them from seeking employment off the farm, lest their land be taken away. The government’s ineffective aid to small farmers and concessions to agribusiness also fall under this heading.
Population dynamics matter too, especially at the household level. Mogues observed that high fertility rates affect food security in several ways:
In Ethiopia, women in rural areas play a key role in agricultural production, food purchases, non-production activities in the agriculture value chain, and in home preparation of food. Thus, high fertility rates mean that women are less able to devote time to these agricultural activities as they need to allocate more time and resources to child rearing, which has food security implications above and beyond the fact that produced or purchased food will have to be shared with household members in a larger household.
Age structures are also important. Nearly half of the Ethiopian people are “dependents” – under age 14 or over 65. This high dependency ratio diminishes productivity in agriculture and other sectors, because a lower share of the population is in the workforce.
Finally, migration – or the lack of it – plays a role. Government policies aimed at keeping ethnic groups in their home regions suppresses migration to cities and more productive rural lands. Freer migration could reduce pressure on overworked land, allow more appropriate division of labor, and energize development.
A Comprehensive Approach
How can the government and donors address the myriad causes of hunger in Ethiopia? With a “comprehensive approach to food security that includes attention to the full spectrum of population dynamics and geographic distribution,” said Charles Teller in an interview.
That means a robust safety net for the most vulnerable, integrated with ongoing programs to bolster nutrition and health. It means flexible migration policies and stronger rural-urban linkages, coupled with better planned urban development.
It also means agricultural policies that help small farmers improve their productivity, rather than displacing them. According to Ethiopian development expert Fantu Cheru, those policies can include foreign direct investment, as long as the government negotiates terms of engagement that are transparent and fair. For example, the proceeds from cash crops should be invested in improving production of staple foods through extension services, infrastructure, and better equipment for poor farmers.
And it means policies that support – and capture the benefits from – the transition to lower fertility. That demographic transition could improve food security in Ethiopia by freeing up women’s time and lowering the dependency ratio. But the transition is not automatic; it requires supportive policies, such as girls’ education, employment opportunities for women, and enforcement of laws against child marriage.
Importantly, it requires access to family planning and reproductive health services. Today, just 27 percent of married Ethiopian women use modern contraception. One in four have an “unmet need” for family planning – they wish to prevent or delay pregnancy but are not using an effective method of contraception. Addressing that unmet need would have important benefits for women and their families, and it could also help fight chronic hunger.
In this land of contrasts and contradictions, the causes of food insecurity are numerous and complex. Neither Malthus nor Boserup could fully capture that complexity, but both perspectives offer insight on the limitations of current policy – and help point the way to a less hungry future.
Laurie Mazur is a consultant on population and the environment for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and director of the Population Justice Project.
Sources: CIA, Central Statistical Agency (Ethiopia), Food and Agriculture Organization, Human Rights Watch, Journal of Peasant Studies, MEASURE DHS, Overseas Development Institute, Population Action International, Population Reference Bureau, Rodrik (2002), Teller (2011), The Economist, The Global Mechanism, UN Population Division, U.S. Geological Survey, United Press International, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Early morning in Lalibela,” courtesy of flickr user Dietmar Temps
Ethiopian lake reveals history of African droughts
by Adele Rackley
A new survey of Lake Tana in Ethiopia – the source of the Blue Nile – suggests that drought may have contributed to the demise of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, around 4200 years ago.
A team led by the University of Aberystwyth used seismic surveys and sediment cores to work out how the lake’s water levels has varied over the past 17,000 years and linked this to evidence for global climate change. Understanding how and why rainfall patterns change is particularly important for sub-Saharan Africa, where prolonged droughts have such serious social and economic consequences.
The climate here is dominated by the African-Asian monsoon and the movements of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). This is an area of erratic weather patterns, where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet close to the equator: sailors know it as the Doldrums. Seasonal movements of the ITCZ can affect the strength of the monsoon. A strong monsoon leads to higher lake levels, and this can be traced in ancient lake sediments. Lake Tana is particularly good for this kind of research because it’s close to the northern limit of the ITCZ so even slight a southward movement of the ITCZ is reflected in the lake’s geological history.
Fleshing out the detail of the region’s rainfall history and linking it to past climate change can improve predictions of future rainfall. The detail enables scientists to check the ability of their climate models to accurately ‘predict’ past climate change; this fine tuning means they can be more confident of the models’ accuracy when predicting future events. There was already strong evidence for an abrupt drought in Africa around 16,500 years ago, linked to changes in the Earth’s climate. The researchers wanted to understand the region’s subsequent climate history, including finding any evidence for a dry period around 4200 years ago, when the Egyptian Old Kingdom declined. Read more: http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=1019
Source: Planetearth
10 million at risk from East Africa drought
By Mark Tutton, for CNN
East Africa is in the midst of its worst drought in more than 60 years, with as many as 10 million people at risk.
The drought has led to crop failures and food shortages in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Somalia, and now a refugee crisis looms as people leave their homes to escape hunger.
The U.N. says thousands of Somalis are leaving their country, ending up in parched and overcrowded refugee camps.
Dadaab in Kenya is the world’s largest refugee camp. Intended for 90,000 people, the U.N. says there are now more than 380,000 there.
And things look set to get worse. “All the predictions show seasonal rains are far away and the situation will deteriorate — we have not even reached the peak of the crisis,” said Dr. Unni Krishnan, disaster coordinator for children’s development organization plan international. Read more about this news here: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/07/08/east.africa.drought/
Now is not the time for donor fatigue
By Matt Wade
In a year already marked by natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies, another tragedy is unfolding in the Horn of Africa. Failed crops and high global food prices have triggered severe food shortages across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti. The UN warns that more than 10 million people are threatened by the worst drought to hit the region in six decades.
As village wells dry up and livestock perish, tens of thousands are leaving their homes in search of food and water. More than 360,000 people have taken shelter at Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border, and there are fears that could soon swell to 500,000. Aid officials have not yet declared a famine but they warn the crisis threatens to turn into a catastrophe. Images
of malnourished children and parched African landscapes now being broadcast from the region are reminiscent of the great Ethiopian famine of 1984 which shocked the world and transformed the international aid sector. It also spawned a new style of celebrity activism. The 1984 Band Aid single Do they know its Christmas and the Live Aid concerts in July 1985 raised about $150 million. But the fund-raising power of African crises has waned since the mid-1980s. World Vision Australia has been running an appeal for the Horn of Africa since January but the response has been disappointing. Less than 40 per cent of the fund-raising target has been met.
”Back in 1984 the shocking pictures really grabbed people’s attention, but it doesn’t mobilise people in the same way any more,” one aid worker said. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/now-is-not-the-time-for-donor-fatigue-20110708-1h6mc.html#ixzz1RWiTXLP9
Ethiopia Expects Decision on Funding for Irrigation This Week
The Nile River
June 21 (Bloomberg) –Ethiopia expects the World Bank to decide this week whether to provide an additional $60 million of funding for an irrigation project in its Nile Basin, a Water and Energy Ministry official said. The Washington-based lender provided $100 million since 2008 to support the Nile Basin Irrigation and Drainage Project, Hayalsew Yilma, program coordinator at the ministry, said in an interview yesterday in the Addis Ababa, the capital. “We are negotiating with the bank for additional funding,” Hayalsew said. “It’s going to be presented to the bank’s board on June 23.” The project aims to
irrigate 20,000 hectares (49,421 acres) of land to help transform subsistence farmers in the area in northwestern Ethiopia into sellers of surplus crops. Studies are being conducted on the potential for an additional 97,000 hectares to be irrigated.
Ethiopia’s five-year growth plan aims to increase the amount of irrigated land fivefold to about 10,000 hectares by mid-2015, Hayalsew said. Bank funding may be forthcoming “as long as the projects do not cause significant harm to downstream countries,” he said. As much as 2.2 million hectares of Ethiopia’s 3.7 million hectares of irrigable land is in the Nile Basin, according to the ministry. Increasing irrigation may boost food security in Africa’s second-most populous nation. About 3 million Ethiopians currently receive emergency assistance and another 7.8 million get food or cash under an aid program to support them, the United Nations said in April. “Countries like Ethiopia are no longer looking at food security, poverty, and climate change separately,” World Bank spokesman Heather Worley said in an e-mailed response to questions on June 17. “Climate-smart agriculture and irrigation practices are key to solving food security issues and increasing crop yields.”
–Editors: Paul Richardson, Karl Maier.
UNDERSTANDING LAND INVESTMENT DEALS IN AFRICA
Unregulated land purchases by foreign investors are forcing millions of African smallholder farmers off their land in order to make room for export commodities such as cut flowers and biofuels.
A series of investigative reports published by the US-based Oakland Institute says that these investments are increasing price volatility and supply insecurity in the global food system. Titled Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa, the reports examine the impact of “land grabs” in a number of African countries, including Tanzania, South Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali and Sierra Leone. Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, said that the land purchases are “resulting in the displacement of small farmers, environmental devastation, water loss and further political instability such as the food riots that preceded the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions”.
Mittal noted that the Oakland Institute’s research exposed investors who admitted that it is easy to seal a land deal in Africa. “They could usually get what they want in exchange for giving a poor, tribal chief a bottle of Johnnie Walker. When these investors promise progress and jobs to local chiefs, it sounds great – but they don’t deliver, which means no progress and relocating people from their homes,” she
said. Obang Metho, of the Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia, commented that it is naive to think that investors are focused on feeding Africans, creating employment and boosting food supply.
“These land grab agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors.”
According to the Oakland Institute, in 2009 alone almost 60 million hectares of land in Africa was purchased or leased in land grabs. “Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency.” “We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as ‘squatters’ are forcibly removed with no compensation,” noted Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute. He added that the majority of Africa’s poor rely on small farms for their livelihoods and that speculators are seizing their land “promising progress that never happens”.
Winds of Political Risk
The fast-moving events that have ousted long-standing dictators in both Tunisia and Egypt are a wake-up call to global companies that they may not have been paying sufficient attention to yet another kind of risk—this time, political.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s a matter of companies having ignored political risk,” says Roger Schwartz, national political lead at Aon Crisis Management. Companies have just been self-insuring themselves on political risk, he adds. “I think that after Tunisia and Egypt, they may be reassessing their exposure and reassessing that approach.”
This is particularly true for American companies, Schwartz says. “As a rule, European companies have been more proactive about insuring against political risk. American firms have tended to take a more roll-of-the-dice attitude of dealing with things when they happen.”
“Whenever you have a significant world event like we’ve just seen, interest increases among business managers in how you can mitigate perils, including political perils,” says Ken Moyle, executive vice president of Coface North America, a division of Coface, the Paris-based global insurer.“Of course, when these things happen, it’s too late to think about insurance in those markets where it’s happening.”
Until recently, companies could have insured against political risk in Tunisia or Egypt at low rates, notes Sam Wilkin, assistant director of global analysis at Oxford Analytica, a U.S.-based risk consultancy. “Now it would be very costly.” He compares the situation to a homeowner who waits until the wind is knocking down trees to try to buy hurricane insurance.
Wilkin warns that political risks don’t go away. They just change in character, and risk managers shouldn’t think that because one type of risk seems to have faded, all political risk is lessened. “In the 1970s, you had a huge wave of expropriations. In the 1980s, it was debt risks,” he says. “In the 1990s, there were a lot of big infrastructure contract defaults and cancellations. In the last decade, it was expropriations again.
“Now, in 2011, it looks like political unrest may be the thing, though it’s too early to say,” Wilkin adds.
Companies with global investments, global markets or global supply chains need to undertake a process of identifying their political risks and deciding how to mitigate them, Wilkin suggests, using a five-step process.
The fast-moving events that have ousted long-standing dictators in both Tunisia and Egypt are a wake-up call to global companies that they may not have been paying sufficient attention to yet another kind of risk—this time, political.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s a matter of companies having ignored political risk,” says Roger Schwartz, national political lead at Aon Crisis Management. Companies have just been self-insuring themselves on political risk, he adds. “I think that after Tunisia and Egypt, they may be reassessing their exposure and reassessing that approach.”
This is particularly true for American companies, Schwartz says. “As a rule, European companies have been more proactive about insuring against political risk. American firms have tended to take a more roll-of-the-dice attitude of dealing with things when they happen.”
“Whenever you have a significant world event like we’ve just seen, interest increases among business managers in how you can mitigate perils, including political perils,” says Ken Moyle, executive vice president of Coface North America, a division of Coface, the Paris-based global insurer.“Of course, when these things happen, it’s too late to think about insurance in those markets where it’s happening.”
Until recently, companies could have insured against political risk in Tunisia or Egypt at low rates, notes Sam Wilkin, assistant director of global analysis at Oxford Analytica, a U.S.-based risk consultancy. “Now it would be very costly.” He compares the situation to a homeowner who waits until the wind is knocking down trees to try to buy hurricane insurance.
Wilkin warns that political risks don’t go away. They just change in character, and risk managers shouldn’t think that because one type of risk seems to have faded, all political risk is lessened. “In the 1970s, you had a huge wave of expropriations. In the 1980s, it was debt risks,” he says. “In the 1990s, there were a lot of big infrastructure contract defaults and cancellations. In the last decade, it was expropriations again.
“Now, in 2011, it looks like political unrest may be the thing, though it’s too early to say,” Wilkin adds.
Companies with global investments, global markets or global supply chains need to undertake a process of identifying their political risks and deciding how to mitigate them, Wilkin suggests, using a five-step process.
1. Determining your exposure. This process, says Wilkin, can range from the simple, as in creating a listing of property holdings, to complicated, such as looking at supply chains, to very complicated, such as considering reputational risk. “Look at Google,” he says. “They’ll need to examine what the impact on their global operations will be of the role played by their manager in Egypt” in the popular uprising. “People Power and social media add a whole new layer of complexity to the political risk equation,” Wilkin adds.
2. Quantifying the risks. Companies need to estimate the dollar value that a risk poses to their operations before they can decide how to mitigate the risk, or, if they’re buying political coverage, how much to buy.
3. Mitigation. It’s very hard to calculate any probability of political risk, Wilkin and other experts say, so companies should focus instead on steps to mitigate the risks. That could mean deciding to develop a kind of foreign policy for the company, as many oil companies do. It could involve restructuring or relocating operations. (In the ’90s, Enron began putting its power plants on barges, so that if a country was experiencing political problems, it could just tow its property away.) Mitigation might also mean diversifying suppliers in the supply chain.
4. Supplementing with insurance. Companies can add riders to existing property policies or buy political risk policies that protect against things like expropriation or damage from riots, terrorism or political violence. Companies should consult a broker and a lawyer in this process, because the terminology is important. For example, is a unionization campaign a labor problem, or was it politically motivated?
5. Staying alert. Once a company has decided what kinds of mitigation measures to take, it should continue to monitor political risk. The degree of risk, as well as the potential damage to a company’s operations or bottom line, can change dramatically, Wilkin says, and so it’s important to keep reassessing, and adjusting coverage and mitigation measures. It’s also crucial to be aware of how risks interact. For example, he says, if you have major commodity inflation, that can lead to political instability.
A number of global insurers, such as AIG and Coface, provide political coverage. And smaller national insurance companies can offer political risk coverage for domestically domiciled companies. Often, says Aon’s Schwartz, it can pay to shop around for coverage in what is a competitive market. “European and U.K. companies, for instance, are more comfortable insuring against political risk in Eastern Europe and Africa, while American insurers may feel more comfortable insuring against risk in Latin America,” he says.
U.S. companies can also do business with the Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC), a government-run insurer that provides competitively priced coverage for many types of political risks, including expropriation and currency controls.
Evan Freely, global head of Marsh’s political risk and trade credit practice, says while dealing with the government entity can be a bureaucratic headache, having OPIC as a company’s insurer can provide it with added clout in the event of problems like an expropriation or an abrogation of contract on a major infrastructure project, since the full force of the U.S. government stands behind the company.
For more on political risk, see Doing Business in A Volatile World.
Aon’s interactive map of global political risks is here.
Economy: ‘Sub-Saharan Africa Is Speeding Towards Affluence’
By Julio Godoy (Paris)
Africa is heading towards a bright economic future, according to a new book co-authored by the former director of the French state agency for economic cooperation and released recently in Paris.
In the book ‘Le temps de l’Afrique’ (‘The African Age’), Jean-Michel Severino, until last April director of the French state agency for economic cooperation, and his co-author Olivier Ray, argue that sub-Saharan Africa has started the new millennium in far better economic and social conditions that generally assumed.
To support their thesis that ‘Africa is rushing towards affluence’, as Severino put it in an interview, the authors use the most recent economic and social data, showing rapid economic growth, high investment and sinking poverty.
‘The vision that we in Europe have of Africa — of a continent frozen in poverty and disease — is simply wrong,’ Severino declared. ‘On the contrary, today’s sub-Saharan Africa is a region of high economic growth, with numerous business opportunities. Sub-Saharan Africa is now a high speed train rushing towards affluence and prosperity.’
Severino recalled that since the beginning of the century, the sub-Saharan African economy ‘has grown by a yearly average rate of 5.5 percent, against only 1.35 percent in the euro zone’.
Severino quoted a recent study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which shows that African poverty ‘is falling rapidly’.
The NBER paper, by the distinguished economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin and his research assistant Maxim Pinkovskiy, predicts that if ‘the present trends continue, the millennium development goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved’ by 2015.
‘We are not nursing dangerous illusions about Africa,’ Severino told IPS.
All regional indicators, from demographic growth to foreign investments, from urbanisation to participation in international trade, aided by political stability, support the thesis that Africa is steadily moving towards prosperity.
Severino explained that the demographic evolution in the region is now marked by a simultaneous fall in the birth rate and a continued, more moderate population growth.
‘By the year 2050, Africa will count some two billion inhabitants, with 60 percent of them living in cities,’ Severino said. ‘Such a conjunction of urbanisation and demographic growth has historically always led to development, by improving productivity, by creating large markets, by stimulating domestic demand, with positive spill-over effects for the countryside.’
Severino calls this ‘the demographic dividend’ and adds it to the considerable improvement in African state finances, due to the massive writing off of foreign debts and to increases in tax revenues.
Investment too, both state and private, has been steadily growing since the mid-1990s. High prices of commodities and raw materials further help to consolidate this strongly growing collective African economy.
In addition, Africa possesses a significant energy potential. ‘Africa exploits less than seven percent of its hydroelectric potential. The continent also disposes of a large energy potential in wind, sun, biomass and other renewable resources, practically untouched,’ he said.
Severino also considered the People’s Republic of China’s growing economic investments and links with sub-Saharan Africa as another indicator substantiating the thesis of the region’s economic take-off.
At the same time, Severino noticed no single African economic model, strictly speaking. ‘But there are several common factors, such as political stability, sound public finances, investments in infrastructure and relatively high rates of savings and investments.’
Severino cautioned that climate change constitutes a major threat for Africa: ‘The inter-tropical zones are going to be the most affected by climate change. Because the region is very poor, its vulnerability to climate change is even higher.’
Rain patterns have already changed, leading to people remarking that ‘there is no rainy season anymore’. Such changes damage agriculture. In addition, climate change can increase deforestation, with skyrocketing mitigation costs, Severino added.
Some French commentators and economic analysts have praised ‘Le temps de l’Afrique’ as ‘the most passionate book on Africa published (in France) in recent years’ and as ‘offering an innovating view on Africa’.
Other analysts adopt a more critical stance on the book’s optimistic diagnosis.
Bakary Traoré, researcher at the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, regretted that the book ‘does not refer to the consequences of the global economic crisis on African development, or to the challenge of bewildered youth that continues to suffer educational deficits and the consequences of atomised societies.’
Similarly, Traoré regretted that the ‘absence of a welfare state and the inadequacy of political debate allow religion to take on a crucial role in public questions beyond its pure confessional function’. Such subjects, Traoré said, are not discussed in ‘Le temps de l’Afrique’.
Traoré underlined that Severino’s analysis offers an ‘updated reading of the changes taking place in Africa at the moment, and points to the powerful endogenous factors contributing to economic growth.
‘However, Severino and Ray ignore essential questions shaping Africa’s future: The permanent crisis in education; the management of Africa’s strategic market of agriculture; the use of the fiscal and savings resources of the region; and the quality of social protection and assistance.’
All these factors, Traoré said, must be analysed in depth to conceive ‘sound public policies that could transform the present momentum in the region into a steady force to drive African development’.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
Can Uganda and Ethiopia act as Egypt’s “water bankers”?
By Dan Morrison
This post is part of a special National Geographic news series on global water issues.
I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.
“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”
I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.
The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program. Read more…http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2010/08/can-uganda-and-ethiopia-be-water-bankers-for-egypt.html
Source: National Geographic News
