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Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi

Ethiopia: Does Meles Zenawi still believe large-scale farms as "patently stupid"?

Stephanie McCrummen of The Washington Post wrote a front-page story on the Post last Monday chronicling about the leasing of Ethiopian land to foreign investors. The story has been syndicated at many other major papers around the world. What she does not say in the story is whether Ethiopian farmers have been forced off the land or not. Although she wrote that, Ethiopian farmers were told that they can no longer water their cows at a river which is now being used solely for irrigation. Here is what she wrote, "From there it was possible to see a river designated for irrigating cornfields and rice paddies; it is no longer open for locals to water their cows."

Ethiopia has set aside farm land almost the size of Belgium for agribusiness and last year Meles Zenawi was asked by Financial Times, if they [investors] will be given land which is not being farmed at the moment. And Meles Zenawi said yes, and we certainly hope that is the case that no Ethiopian farmers are being forced off their land to make room for foreign 'investors'.

In August 2008, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was asked why Ethiopian government focused on small-scale agriculture. Here is an excerpt from the interview with the Financial Times.

FT: One comment I’ve heard from several people about agriculture is that the government has been focusing very much, as you said, on commercialising small-scale farms. But these people say is you should be focused on big-scale farming and creating large commercial enterprises, because that’s the way to prevent a recurrence of the food shortages. Why have you decided to focus on the small scale rather than go big?

Meles Zenawi: Because the alternative is patently stupid.

FT: Why is that?

MZ: Let’s look at two factors. The first factor is the availability of capital and savings in this economy. There are very, very low savings and very limited capital availability. If we were to invest in large-scale, commercial, mechanised farming, then we would have to deplete whatever savings we have in establishing these large-scale farms, and what do we get in return? We get in return some employment, but not much. If we were to focus on the commercialisation of small-scale farming, we wouldn’t need that much capital. We would be using the excess resource we have, which is labour and land, and we would be combining these two without too much capital to produce more. Secondly, we would be employing millions of people on their farms and giving them income. The problem that we face this year is not about production. It’s about income distribution and income distribution in Ethiopia is not going to be improved by abandoning small-scale farms and concentrating on large-scale farms. Fortunately in our case, to the extent that capital can be imported from abroad, we can do both because we have unutilised land in the lowlands where there is not much labour and we can combine that with foreign capital to supplement the small-scale farming. Such supplementary large-scale commercial farming is part of our strategy, but it is not the central piece of our strategy.

FT: And this is why you were meeting a delegation from Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago?

MZ: Yes, and many other investors including those who are involved in flower farms, horticulture and so on.

FT: They will be given land which is not being farmed at the moment?

MZ: Yes, and we have quite a bit of it, in the western lowlands and part of the eastern lowlands. We have a shortage in the central highlands and that’s where 70-80 per cent of the population live.

FT: But your strategy remains focused on the small scale?

MZ: Yes, because the small-scale farms are where we have the 9m households and what happens there determines their income. Large-scale commercial farming is not going to create millions of jobs and without those jobs, even if we had mountains of food in the country, it would not mean that people had access to that food.

FT: Because they wouldn’t have money to buy it?

MZ: They wouldn’t have the money to buy it and that has been the real problem here. It is not the availability of food. It’s the availability of money in the pockets of individuals.

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Is it a good policy to lease farm land to foreign investors or not? How about privatization of land, do you support or oppose? Have your say