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 entirely, and the summer rains were three weeks late.But why is famine stalking Ethiopia again? The Ethiopian Government is authoritarian, but it isn't incompetent.
It gives fertiliser to farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 90s the country was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the Government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years.
So why are we back here again? Infant deaths are already over two per 10,000 a day in Somali, the worst-hit region of Ethiopia. (Four a day counts as full-scale famine.)
Countrywide, 20 per cent of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign food aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. What have the Ethiopians done wrong?
The real answer (which everybody carefully avoids) 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 - and if you don't control the population, you are just spitting into the wind.
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This is so obvious that it should be the start of every conversation about the country. Even if the coming famine in Ethiopia kills a million people, the population will keep growing.
So the next famine, 10 or 15 years from now, will hit a country of 100 million people, trying to make a living from farming on land where only 40 million faced starvation in the 1980s. It is going to get much uglier in Ethiopia.
Yet it's practically taboo to say that. The whole question of population, instead of being central to the debate about development, about food, about climate change, has been put on ice.
The reason, I think, is that the rich countries are secretly embarrassed, and the poor countries are deeply resentful.
Suppose that Ethiopia had been the first country to industrialise. Suppose some mechanical genius in Tigray invented the world's first steam engine in 1710. The first railways were spreading across the country by the 1830s, and at the same time Ethiopian entrepreneurs and imperialists spread all over Africa. By the end of the 19th century, they controlled half of Europe too.
Never mind the improbabilities. The point is that an Ethiopia with such a history would easily be rich enough to support 80 million people now - and if it could not grow enough food for them all, it would just import it.
Just like Britain (where the industrial revolution actually started) imports food. Money makes everything easy.
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