快猫短视频

TWO DAYS before Meskel, the festival that celebrates finding the True
Cross, and we鈥檙e driving north out of Addis Ababa (see
Map) past patchwork fields of rippling wheat and tef. At the
roadside, smiling children hold up bunches of yellow flowers; Meskel daises,
which bloom at the end of the rainy season. Other children abandon their
cattle and sheep to run towards the road, waving and shouting
鈥渇辞谤别颈驳苍别谤蝉鈥�.贵滨骋-尘驳19503801.骋滨贵

When I last drove this way, nearly 10 years ago, there were no daisies and
my truck was delivering funeral shrouds. They were needed to stop refugees
from the famine wasting precious blankets on the dead. There were a lot of
funerals in 1984 and 1985 鈥� probably about half a million; no one really
knows. I was part of a global media circus who flew in to drive through
landscapes of dust, sit in tin-roofed huts taking notes 鈥� 鈥�87 487 people
seriously affected in this area鈥� 鈥� and brace ourselves to look the 鈥渟eriously
affected鈥� in the face. Then we went home.

Ethiopia has changed a lot in the 10 years since the great famine, mainly
for the better. In 1991, rebel forces deposed a dictator that many held
responsible for perpetuating poverty and war. Two years later, the Red Sea
province of Eritrea won independence, ending 30 years of fighting. In Addis
Ababa, the new rulers drew up a daring national constitution promising local
autonomy and economic freedom. Business, relatively speaking, is booming. Even
the weather has been kind this year. Every farmer we spoke to this September
told us of heavy summer rains and hopes for a good harvest.

But prosperity is only relative in Ethiopia, where life expectancy at birth
is 46 years and a good day鈥檚 wage for a labourer is 3 birr (30p). Over dinner
in Addis Ababa鈥檚 new Chinese restaurant, Richard Blewitt of the Save the
Children Fund warned that recovery from famine is still terrifyingly fragile.
In the early 1980s, it took two consecutive years of drought to trigger
famine. Now, he says, having lost most of their resources, people are less
equipped to cope, and one bad year might be enough. The outside world has
become complacent or apathetic: 鈥淭he donors are asleep, there鈥檚 no food in the
pipeline,鈥� says Blewitt.

Famines happen in Ethiopia because people are poor. When the rains fail, or
come too early or too late, families must sell their livestock, clothing and
farming tools at knock-down prices to buy food. When there鈥檚 nothing left to
sell, the choice is to lie down and die 鈥� some say it happened in 1984 鈥� or to
pack your surviving children on your back and trek towards a place where the
authorities hand out food. It was television pictures of these concentrations
of hunger and disease that shook the world. In all, $2 billion worth of
emergency relief flowed in. The SCF estimates that if one-tenth of this money
had gone on long-term aid, famine would be a ghost of the past.

The past 10 years haven鈥檛 been wasted, though. Apart from Ethiopia鈥檚
political transformation, the biggest advance has been in knowledge. We know
more about how to predict famines (see: 鈥淗igh technology to predict famine鈥�)
and how people survive them. Finally, and after many false starts, science and
technology are starting to come up with tools that can increase production in
the small farms where most victims of Ethiopia鈥檚 famines live.

Compared with technological advances elsewhere over the past 10 years 鈥�
remember portable computers in 1984? 鈥� the results of this research might seem
modest, if not painfully primitive. Anyone who has seen farming in the
Ethiopian highlands will think differently. Techniques have evolved to cope
with shortcomings in three essential commodities: soil, water and fertiliser.
Farmers are understandably reluctant to change these techniques to new
unproven alternatives.

Tough to till

Start with the soil. Much of Ethiopia鈥檚 cultivable land consists of heavy,
cracking clays called vertisols. Potentially, they are fertile enough, but
they are not easy to cultivate. During the rains, vertisols quickly become
waterlogged. Later they dry into a cracked black pancake that is almost
impossible to plough.

Ideally, the farming calendar begins with the 鈥渓ittle rains鈥� of March.
These soften the soil enough to make ploughing possible, but they are
irregular. Often, as in most places we visited this year, they fail
altogether.

Farmers must then wait for the main rainy season between June and September
before they can prepare the soil, using an ox-drawn implement called the
maresha. Strictly speaking, it is not a plough, but an ard: it scratches the
soil rather than turning it. Moses would have recognised one.

If the big rains have been anything like sufficient, the trouble is too
much water. Farmers must wait for the end of the rainy season before planting,
leaving the crop to grow for three or four months on residual moisture. Few
plants can cope with this regime. The traditional favourite is a grass called
tef (Eragrostis teff), whose pinhead-sized grain is part of Ethiopia鈥檚 staple
diet. In a good year, each hectare of land cultivated in this way produces
just 700 kilograms of grain, and few farmers cultivate more than 2 hectares.
Julius Holt of the SCF, an expert in Ethiopian highland economy, admits to
being baffled at how families survive. 鈥淓ven within the SCF, we sometimes read
reports which say people cannot exist in these places, when obviously they
do,鈥� he says.

The final constraint, fertiliser, is the reason yields are so low. Nights
are chilly in the highlands, and wood for fuel is scarce. So families burn
animal dung, dried into cakes, rather than let it fertilise the fields. As for
chemical fertiliser, the cost is way beyond the budget of subsistence farmers;
even if people could afford it, few roads exist to deliver it.

The system cries out for improvement along the lines of the Green
Revolution, which transformed agriculture in south Asia from the 1960s
onwards. But if aid agencies have learnt anything in the past 10 years it is
that high-yielding crop varieties, irrigation and fertilisers are not easy to
apply to Africa鈥檚 poorest farmers.

One research institute that has been trying to crack the problem for 20
years is the International Livestock Centre for Africa, based at Addis Ababa.
The centre, part of the international network of agricultural research
institutes set up in the 1970s to spread the Green Revolution throughout the
developing world, is responsible for the whole of Africa. But its location,
coupled with the fact that with 24 million head of cattle Ethiopia has more
livestock than any other African country, gives the ILCA a special interest in
improving Ethiopian production. Livestock plays a key part in the country鈥檚
complex rural economy, providing draught power and a disposable cash income as
well as meat and dairy products.

The ILCA鈥檚 work spans everything from plant genes to cheese making. When I
visited the centre nine years ago, at the height of the famine, it was the
Highlands Programme that caught my interest. The programme, which had started
in 1976, was obviously important. The highlands 鈥� defined as land over 1500
metres 鈥� dominate Ethiopia and account for 90 per cent of its agricultural
activity, mainly because they are free of malaria and cattle diseases. Four-
fifths of Ethiopia鈥檚 people live in the highlands, and these are the people
most at risk from famine.

It would be nice to report that all the ideas emerging from the Highlands
Programme in 1985 have been successfully applied, but research isn鈥檛 like
that. One failure was the single-ox plough. The idea was simple: few farmers
in the highlands own the pair of oxen needed to pull a maresha plough. In the
northeastern province of Wollo, which is particularly vulnerable to famine,
the average is 0.7 oxen per farmer. So animals are shared in a complex network
of family obligations and commercial deals which, at best, force poor farmers
to plough at a less than ideal time. At worst, they have to hand over four-
fifths of their crop in return for the hire of a team.

The ILCA鈥檚 solution was to double the available draught power by designing
a yoke that would pull the plough behind a single ox. Field trials showed that
one properly fed animal could do 70 per cent of the work of a pair, and in
1985 aid agencies began distributing the plough to farmers as part of a
package to help them recover from famine.

Learning lessons

At the time I wrote an enthusiastic report on the single-ox plough in New
快猫短视频. But I was wrong. Many of the new yokes ended up as firewood because
farmers were worried about exhausting their animals in hard highland soils.
Apart from a few sightings reported in lowland areas, the one-ox plough seems
to have vanished without trace, joining the long history of 鈥渁ppropriate鈥�
technologies that turn out to be appropriate only when an outside agency gives
them away.

The ILCA took the lessons on board in its next attempt to improve highland
farming technology, the Joint Vertisol Project. This is a partnership between
the ILCA, its sister Institute of Crop Research in Semi-Arid Tropics in India,
the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, and Alemaya University, southwest of
Addis Ababa. This project also involves a plough, but this time it is part of
a carefully assembled package that blends new measures with traditional
techniques.

The idea is to deal with waterlogged soils using what is known as broad-bed
and furrow cultivation. Farmers plant crops on raised beds 0.8 metres wide,
flanked by furrows that draw off surplus water. 鈥淥nce you can drain the soil,
a lot of things can happen,鈥� says Mohammed Saleem, head of the Highland
Programme. 鈥淵ou can shift the planting date, plant in June rather than
September, so you鈥檙e increasing the length of the growing season. You can
plant a higher yielding crop or perhaps two crops.鈥� Increases in yield depend
very much on the extent of waterlogging, but Saleem says farmers are reporting
increases 鈥渇rom 30 per cent to 300 per cent鈥�.

Farmers at Inawari, north of Addis Ababa, have cultivated broad-beds and
furrows for several generations. They shaped the soil by hand 鈥� a backbreaking
job usually done by women. The lLCA scientists set out to ease their burden
and to find ways to apply the technology elsewhere. After much work, they
developed the simplest and cheapest possible plough for making broad-beds
(see: 鈥淟ow technology to prevent famine鈥�).

The system proved itself at the ILCA鈥檚 Debre Zeit field station. By the end
of the 1980s, it was ready for trials on farms. The project began distributing
broad-bed makers and selling packages of improved seed and fertilisers on easy
terms.

Then the real world threw in another complication. At that time, farmers
were organised into 鈥減easant associations鈥� and producer cooperatives in line
with the government鈥檚 Marxist philosophy, and it was through these
associations that the ILCA promoted its package. On my first visit to
Ethiopia, in 1983, I was impressed by the ability of organisations with names
such as Anti-Exploitation Producers鈥� Co-Op to mobilise farmers in projects to
plant trees and build terraces. But peasant associations had another side:
they depended on coercion, sometimes brutal. In 1990, the government dissolved
the system, and no one I spoke to this year mourned the co-ops鈥� demise. The
worry of the vertisol project鈥檚 researchers was that farmers鈥� revulsion
against collectivisation would rub off on approaches that had been promoted
through peasant associations 鈥� including broad-bed cultivation. 鈥淲e thought
that was the end of the project,鈥� Saleem says. The team was relieved to find,
however, that farmers actually became more enthusiastic about the technology
after the reforms.

Knock-on effect

The scientists had to tread carefully for the next phase of the project,
too. It tackled a problem fundamental to any scheme involving water use: what
happens to your neighbour downstream? If used in isolation, broad-beds may
make waterlogging worse on land being farmed by traditional methods further
down the hill.

With funding from the Dutch government, the project is studying the effect
of broad-bed techniques over an entire watershed. At Ginchy, a highland area
to the west of Addis Ababa, the results look dramatic. Broad-bed fields are
bursting with neat, metre-high stands of wheat. Alongside, a traditionally
planted tef field looks like a badly maintained rugby pitch. Researchers
expect a yield of 2 tonnes per hectare from the wheat, a high-yielding variety
called ET 13, compared with 700 kilograms from the tef. The project, started
in April, covers 300 hectares and involves about 60 local farmers.

The broad-bed package will not solve every farmer鈥檚 problems. It depends on
chemical fertiliser, and so is relevant mainly to farmers who are in the
market economy. According to an independent evaluation by James McCann of
Boston University, it 鈥渨ill most likely succeed where markets for grain and
forage are best developed, that is near urban markets and where pressure to
increase crop yield is high鈥�. Another snag is that so far, scientists have
done virtually no work on improved varieties of tef, which may turn out to be
more suitable than wheat. Finally, broad-bed cultivation is suitable only for
fairly flat land. On a gradient of more than 1 per cent, the runoff takes
topsoil with it, adding to Ethiopia鈥檚 massive losses through soil erosion.

Saleem, however, points out that a quarter of all the reasonably flat
vertisol land in the highlands is left fallow because of waterlogging.
Bringing it into production would reduce the need to cultivate the slopes,
where farmers work gradients of up to 45掳. And as the population
increases, it is better to expand cultivation into land that was previously
not used because of waterlogging than onto the hillsides, which would become
more vulnerable to erosion.

Meanwhile, another collaboration between the ILCA and local institutions is
having a stab at the ox problem again. In the Ethiopian highlands, oxen work
only two months of the year, when ploughing and threshing; for the remaining
10 months their owners get nothing back for their keep. In 1985, ILCA
scientists were wondering if cows could pull ploughs as well as produce milk.
The idea has two advantages. On the local scale, farmers could earn money by
selling more dairy products and calves for fattening. The broader hope is that
the scheme would ease pressure on pastures. Today a farmer must maintain a
herd of around six cattle to be sure that an ox of working age is available.
If cows could pull ploughs, farmers would need fewer animals.

Experiments began in 1989 with crossbreeds of Friesian and local Boran
cattle, chosen to combine good milk production with the ability to cope with
Ethiopia鈥檚 climate. As draught animals, these cattle have proved to be as
powerful as native oxen. This is hardly surprising, as the crossbreeds are
noticeably larger. More interesting is the finding that the crossbreeds
produce useful quantities of milk whether or not they are worked. 鈥淎 properly
fed working cow behaves more or less like a nonworking animal,鈥� Saleem says.
Demand for milk, butter and cheese is rising quickly in Ethiopia鈥檚 towns.
Here, with the help of some other ILCA innovations such as a cheap and
efficient butter churn, was an obvious way to increase farmers鈥� incomes.

Confident that they have the technical solution, the scientists, working
with the Ethiopian government鈥檚 Institute of Agricultural Research, are
tackling cultural objections. Since February 1993, the project has been
selling pairs of pregnant cows at a good price to farmers prepared to get rid
of their draught oxen. Alemu Ghebre-Wold of the IAR says that farmers were
sceptical at first, but eventually found the package irresistible. If all goes
well, there will be 500 鈥渄ual-purpose鈥� cows at work by the end of next
year.

Broad-bed cultivation and multipurpose cows are only two among dozens of
possible technical fixes available to Ethiopian farmers. The ILCA, of course,
has a vested interest in promoting them. But it is interesting that
organisations such as the SCF, which are rooted in more direct activities such
as primary healthcare, are also stressing agricultural improvements. In its
report of a survey of Wollo in 1993, the SCF concluded: 鈥淭he cost of, say, 100
000 tonnes of food aid is without doubt many times greater than the cost of
much-expanded pest-control activities, which would include other measures than
pesticide use. The case for greater investment in this seems to us
incontrovertible and urgent.鈥� Basic veterinary services, too, could pay
dividends far exceeding their cost.

Will it happen? It鈥檚 easy to be pessimistic about Ethiopia. According to
one estimate, its population will triple to 177 million by 2030. With no
accurate census data available, this prediction is even less reliable than
most, but clearly a larger population will not be able to live on a system of
agriculture that cannot cope today. Even a Green Revolution would have little
impact on poverty if it squeezed farmers off the land to make way for
businesses with lines of credit to pay for high-yielding crops and the
fertilisers and pesticides to make them work.

But look on it another way. Ethiopia has perhaps half the population
density of Britain and an economic potential almost entirely untapped; for a
start, its history, scenery and climate should make it one of Africa鈥檚 leading
tourist destinations. Could its people create a development model for the
whole continent? Stranger things have happened: Japan had famines, once.

Our own trip ended on an optimistic note, amid signs of real change. We
flew north, over the razor ridges of the Simien Mountains, to independent
Eritrea. At the Asmara office of the SCF, the local deputy director, Temesghen
Araya, told us, 鈥淲e are very happy that after 30 years of war we are breathing
the air of freedom.鈥� He described the new battle, to provide basic vaccines
and medical care to ten of thousands of returned refugees.

Araya recommended that we visit the 鈥渢ank graveyard鈥�, a field on the
outskirts of the city littered with millions of dollars鈥� worth of abandoned
military hardware: tanks with gun barrels drooping towards the ground,
armoured personnel carriers, some with machine guns still jutting from their
turrets, an artillery piece stabbing the sky. Most of the equipment was
Soviet-made, a relic of strategic interest in the Horn of Africa.

The tanks鈥� hatches were all propped open. I once heard of a British Army
superstition that they should be left that way, to let the crews鈥� spirits
escape. If that was the idea, it hadn鈥檛 worked here. The ghosts of 1985 were
all around.

High technology to predict famine

OVER the past 10 years, aid agencies have learnt that detecting famines
before people die is harder than it sounds. African rural economies are highly
complex. Even so-called subsistence farmers depend on a mixture of
agriculture, livestock herding, wage income and trading. In bad years, the
relative importance of these sources of income changes. Simple indicators such
as rising grain prices and falling livestock prices may not tell you very
much.

鈥淭he problem with all these indicators is you have to know the area well to
interpret them in any way,鈥� says Penny Allen, a nutritionist with the Save the
Children Fund. Allen and her colleagues have developed a computer program
called Risk, which tries to make sense out of the complexity.

The program breaks a country up into a number of areas, within which
climate, the economy and methods of farming are all relatively homogeneous.
These areas rarely coincide with administrative boundaries. The program鈥檚 raw
material is information on how families get their food: whether through
farming, selling livestock or firewood, or casual labour.

Another set of data covers the rescoures people have to fall back on in
hard times. This is usually livestock and cash, though Allen admits that
information on money is often 鈥渁 shot in the dark鈥�. Also, very little data
exist on the capacity of labour markets to provide employment in times of
hardship.

The system then models the impact of a change, such as a shortfall in food
production, in sets of bar charts. It produces an estimate of the percentage
of the population with a deficit, and the mean deficit, and can do so early
enough for aid agencies to set in motion the machinery of delivering emergency
food. The Save the Children Fund is hoping for another year鈥檚 funding to
develop the system further. The plan is to release it as a package that will
run on standard personal computers.

Low technology to prevent famine

THE ILCA鈥檚 first design for a broad-bed maker, in 1986, consisted of a
heavy, square frame made from two cut-down traditional ploughs, each fitted
with a metal wing to pile up soil into seed beds. It worked well in
experiments, but farmers found the tool awkward to transport and store. Worst
of all, anyone making one had to permanently modify two valuable traditional
ploughs, rendering them useless for ordinary cultivation.

The following year, researchers came up with a simpler and more adaptable
design. It consists of two ploughs lashed together to make a triangle 1 metre
across at the base. The farmer then ties on two metal wings to shape the seed
bed and a chain that drags along the ground, smoothing the soil and covering
seeds. The whole thing costs about 200 birr (拢20) and can be assembled
in a few minutes.

Further reading: Famine and Survivial Strategies by Dessalegn Rahmato,
Scandinavian Institute of African Studies (1991); Improving Livestock
Production in Africa from the International Livestock Centre for Africa
(1994); Making Ends Meet: a Survey of the Food Economy of the Ethiopian
Northeast Highlands from Save the Children Fund (1993); Famine and Food
Security in Ethiopia, Lessons for Africa by Patrick Webb and Joachim von
Braun, John Wiley (1994).