WSJ.com : “Today is World Food Day and, once again, millions of people in East Africa are starving. Some have sought to turn this tragedy into opportunity. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi blames Western-induced climate change, and demands that rich countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide more aid. These views are echoed by the World Bank, Oxfam, Christian Aid and that bellwether of bad ideas, Gordon Brown. But such top-down solutions are doomed to failure. If Africans are to to weather their existing and future climates, the solutions must come from the bottom up. “

…..

“Before about 1800, famine was a common cause of death everywhere. The majority of the world’s population were subsistence farmers. When conditions were good, they produced enough to eat and a little more. When conditions were bad, they consumed their savings. If the bad conditions persisted, they died.

Then, first in England and soon in many other parts of the world, people began to rise above subsistence. They specialized more narrowly than before in the production of certain goods and they traded with others who also specialized. This led to increased output, as specialists were able to produce more than generalists. Competition in the supply of goods drove innovation, which led to further increases in output. Agricultural production rose dramatically and famine declined.

Two European famines of the nineteenth century stand out as exceptions: Ireland from 1845 to 1852, and Finland from 1866 to 1868. Both were the result of oppressive governments restricting the rights of individuals to own land and trade. In both countries, subsistence farming, combined with disease and bad weather, resulted in the death of many.

Since the 1920s, global deaths from drought-related famines have fallen by 99.9%. The reason? Continued specialization and trade, which has skyrocketed the amount of food produced per capita, and has enabled people in drought-prone regions to diversify and become less vulnerable.”

nytimes.com : “…Bekele’s final race here was the best of these championships. A small, elegant and resilient Ethiopian, he needed one of the gutsiest performances of his career to win the men’s 5,000 meters.”

The so called Ethiopian People Patriotic Front seems to be working with the Eritrean government.

Shouldn’t they change their name to the Eritrean People Patriotic Front??

VOANews.com:"Ethiopian scientistwas named on Thursday as the winner of the 2009 World Food Prize in an event at the U.S. State Department. Ejeta, a faculty member at Purdue University in the Midwestern U.S. state of Indiana, was honored for his work on drought and weed-resistant varieties of sorghum. "

Source: Strategypage.com

June 11, 2009: Ethiopia is under growing diplomatic pressure from Western nations to stop persecuting opposition politicians in advance of the national elections next year. It is feared that Ethiopia is turning into a dictatorship again. China doesn’t care, but many other nations do. However, none of them want to do much about it, as Ethiopia is an island of tranquility in a volatile region.

The UN is under great pressure to sanction Eritrea, which is the major supporter of Islamic radicals in Somalia. Eritrea is doing this to get back at Ethiopia, as the two nations are disputing a patch of desert on their border. Eritrea is controlled by a dictator who runs the country like it’s North Korea and doesn’t care what the world thinks. Iran supports Eritrea, with cash, weapons and the use of key allies in the UN (like China and Russia). Thus UN sanctions are unlikely, although Western nations running the pirate patrol may be persuaded to blockade Eritrea. The UN will do nothing, other than call for donations, to keep the killers and potential victims fed.

June 4, 2009: Somali rebels in Ogaden continue to threaten oil companies working in the province. The rebels (the ONLF, or Ogaden National Liberation Front) have been keeping a low profile since Ethiopian troops came after them last year, and killed or captured many of the ethnic Somali separatists. The ONLF wants Somalis in Ogaden to get a share of any oil produced. That is not likely to happen.

May 31, 2009: Ethiopia has allowed Eritreans expelled, when the two countries went to war in 1998, to reclaim assets frozen after the expulsion. This good will gesture is an effort to get economic activity between the two nations going.

May 18, 2009: Ethiopian patrols are now crossing the border and passing through Somali villages, collecting information on what the Somali Islamic radicals might be planning. Somali radical groups like al Shabaab have threatened to invade Ethiopia to annex Ogaden province (which Ethiopia and Somalia, or Somalis, have been fighting over for centuries.)

May 14, 2009: China is lending Ethiopia $400 million for road building and power plant projects. The U.S. has donated 88,000 tons of food (worth about $50 million) for Ethiopians in areas where drought has destroyed crops. Western nations are providing Ethiopia with over $2 billion in aid this year, for famine relief and economic development. The economy is crumbling, largely because the biggest export crop, coffee, has declined 40 percent this year because of lower demand (the global recession) and competition.

Google News: "Ethiopia on Thursday charged 46 people, most of them ex-military, of plotting to assassinate government officials, a government spokesman said."

Fighting for power while the whole country is going down the drain.

VOA News: "In a country where a fewer than 20 percent of the people have electricity, the economic concerns of most Ethiopians are about simpler things, such as food. "

When is it going to end?

ForeignPolicyJournal.com: "….We must base our foreign policy on the ideas we believe in ourselves, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us feel. And when a particular government is proven to repress their media we should call them out and do nothing to lend them credence. It was the Ethiopian Ambassador to the U.S. himself, Samuel Assefa, who told me that the Ethiopian government must control the press, otherwise Ethiopians might commit ethnic genocide on themselves. All this is coming from a government that has instituted a policy of “Ethnic Federalism” which intentionally creates a divide between the many ethnic tribes within the country. This government has done little or nothing to foster a sense of national identity. It’s an old formula, control the press and divide everyone to decrease the threat of losing power. Comments like the one Dr. Frazer made simply send the wrong signal to the world."

Huffingtonpost.com/: "….. One such social barrier is a bad government — like a government that fails to deliver the bed nets and malaria medicines — a factor that Sachs still refuses to do justice. Sachs’ admission that Zimbabwe has a bad government is not exactly revolutionary. This continues his longtime reluctance to admit there is bad government in any except a handful of extreme despots. In his UN Millennium Project in 2005, he only named four bad governments: Belarus, Myanmar, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. At the time, he listed 63 poor countries that are "potentially well governed" (a phrase equivalent to calling Paris Hilton "potentially a virgin.") Sachs’ list included 5 out of the 7 countries singled out by Transparency International at the time as the most corrupt in the world, and fifteen governments that Freedom House classifies as "not free." Even a despot like the late Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, who so terrorized his country that he renamed the months of the year after himself and his mother, couldn’t get into Sachs’ bad government club at the time. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia is inexplicably a Sachs darling despite rigging elections, jailing opposition politicians, shooting demonstrators, fielding an army accused of atrocities in the Ogaden, and fomenting corrupt practices that give Ethiopia a ranking on Transparency International of 138th out of 179 countries."