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various - often
conflicting - mindsets, ideologies and worldviews, as well as
assumptions on what works and what does not, guide our particular
context when it comes to agricultural and rural development
policies.
True, much has
been achieved in recent times. However, growth in rural population
and unemployed labour force has outstripped these achievements. The
world around us has also changed at a relentless pace as a result of
which, in relative terms, we are worse off today on many counts than
we were 30 years ago.
Our experience
with agricultural and rural development planning has fostered much
national learning for us to re-examine the limits of both
institutional structure and technology-investment led approaches. I
would argue that time is ripe for a paradigm shift: for our
policymakers to undertake a fundamental review of their past
strategies and goals, and question the assumptions about
cause-effect relationships. We need to focus much more on how we, as
a nation, can do things differently than on what we are used to
doing.
If Ethiopia’s
rural economy is going to keep up with the times, (and of course,
its growing population and rural labour force), we need to pursue a
different goal and adopt another strategy which are more in keeping
with our new realities and new times. As Ethiopia struggles, over
the coming decades, to pull itself up by the bootstraps, it will be
unlikely to find much success unless it is able to turn around its
agriculture and rural economy. For, rather than becoming the engine
of our economic growth, Ethiopian rural sector will become a drag to
the national economy.
Linear thinking
and projections do not inspire hope for a bright future. It is
unlikely that Ethiopia’s population growth will fall perceptibly for
quite some time; there are no technological breakthroughs on the
horizon, nor do we see that vital élan in our agricultural research
establishments.
Under the
inexorable pressure of rising rural population and workforce, the
average land holding size will continue to decline. And,
counter-intuitively, crowding at the bottom of the land-holding
ladder rather than at the top will emerge as the major source of
growing rural economic inequality.
The central
problem that we need to tackle in rural development is how to make a
marginal farm into a viable economic unit. Significantly, series of
studies have argued rather strongly that immediate inverse
relationship exist between agricultural growth and rural poverty
indices. The recent economic growth evidences seem to suggest not
only that there may be conflict between growth and equity, but also,
as a matter of fact, rapid agricultural growth may be the only
sustainable answer to the plight of Ethiopia’s rural poor.
What Ethiopia’s
rural economy seems to need most is to break out of the ebb and flow
of development indicators, which ultimately depends on the amount of
rainfall clouding the Ethiopian skies. Above everything else, what
we need is to strive for the real value of agricultural output in
order to grow for the coming two decades; by around 2020, we will
have to break out of the ‘poverty trap’. With employment elasticity
with respect to the value of agricultural output of medium
proportion, we will have to clear the backlog of the rural
unemployed by the early years of the next century.
I am not here
suggesting that there will be a decent livelihood for every
Ethiopian. However, even as crowding at the bottom continues, being
a plain agricultural labourer or a marginal farmer in much of
Ethiopia will not be as bad as it is in recent years.
This sort of
growth in the agricultural-rural economy hardly comes from economic
planning of the variety we have pursued so far; neither can it come
from tinkering around with resource allocation nor a sterile search
for technological miracles. It can only come from a quantum jump in
the way we, as a society, think and work.
International
figures and foreign media are lauding the economic progress of
Ethiopia as impressive achievements; so they may appear, but only
when compared to a handful of nations, which during the last few
decades, have performed less than we have. Worse still, this growth
has just not been good enough when compared to the growth of our
population and the challenges it poses. Converted to per capita
terms, many of these good-looking steeply rising output curves
become flat, or even fall.
The moot point
is that all the achievements bragged about have done little to
improve the conditions of the large and growing rural poor, and much
less to enhance their capacity to improve their lot in the long run.
Indeed, when compared to what we need to achieve, our progress so
far pales into insignificance. At this rate, Ethiopia will enter its
new millennium as a miserable nation with many millions half-clad,
hungry rural unemployed and under-employed, an individual income of
no more than 110 dollars per year, and little rural social
infrastructure to speak of.
In addressing
these socio-economic problems, I think, orthodox economic planning
is unlikely to prepare the nation to meet the challenges of rapid
agricultural and rural employment growth that it has failed to
tackle so far. I would argue, more is wrong with Ethiopia than just
the planning of its resource generation and allocation.
What Ethiopia
needs to do most is to focus, above all, on devising radical and
innovative strategies that can yield and sustain rapid and sustained
annual growth rate in the value of output of the agricultural
sector. Recent experience suggests that in nations which have
secured anywhere near such high growth rates, the state and its
agents of economic development have done more than just orthodox
economic planning.
In Ethiopia
too, this seemingly unachievable goal can be achieved, but only by
redesigning the chemistry between the state and our institutions of
economic development - our legal framework, markets, and economic
organizations in the private, public, co-operative and informal
sectors.
In a new
national ambience, the state must establish, as the super-ordinate
goal of its policy, continual and sustained enhancement of the
wealth producing capacity of our rural economy. Equity, employment,
food security and environmental balance must, at least for the next
15 years or so, be viewed as subsidiary goals which can be best
achieved, in the medium run, by decisively channelling the
productive energy of all of the nation’s institutions of economic
development.
I also argue
that, contrary to the popular belief, what Ethiopia needs is not
less state in the economic sphere but better state; what we need is
to roll back the present ‘awkward’ state; and instead, roll forth a
nurturing state which can skilfully craft the engines of economic
development that Ethiopia is in dire need. |
