Republic of Hunger, Ethiopia heading for another famine

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A quarter century after a million Ethiopians died in the great hunger of 1984-85, the country is heading into another famine. The spring rains failed, and the summer rains were three weeks late. But why is famine stalking Ethiopia again?

The Ethiopian government is authoritarian but isn't bad or incompetent. It gives fertilizer to the farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 1990s, Ethiopia was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years.

At present infant deaths are already over two per 10,000 per day in Somali, the worst hit region in Ethiopia (Four per day counts as full-scale famine). Country-wide 20% of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. So what have the Ethiopians done wrong?

The real answer is that they have had too many babies. Ethiopia's population at the time of the last famine was 40 million. Twenty-five years later, it is 80 million. You can do everything else right - give your farmers new tools and skills, fight erosion, create food reserves - but if you don't control the population, you are just spitting into the wind.

Even if the coming famine kills a million people, the population will keep growing. So the next famine, 10-15 years from now, will hit a country of a 100 million people trying to make a living from farming on land where only 40 million faced starvation in the 1980s. The whole question of population, instead of being central to the debate about development, food and climate change, has been put on ice. At its current rate of growth, Ethiopia's population will double again in just 32 years. Famine will become normal in Ethiopia well before that. No combination of wise domestic policies and no amount of foreign aid can stop it.

History is unfair. Conversations between those who got lucky and those left holding the other end of the stick are awkward. But we cannot go on ignoring the elephant in the room. We have to start talking about population again.