The Economist reports:
Ethiopian officials say that this failed harvest is as bad as the catastrophic droughts that befell Ethiopia in 1965-66, 1972-73 and 1984-85, killing more than 1m people in all. But a sophisticated food-security system means that poor Ethiopians these days can cope much better with drought than before.
“Many, many people died in the past. But we now have early-warning systems and programmes to mobilise grain from areas of surplus to areas of scarcity,” says Mohammed Yasin, head of Disaster Prevention and Food Security in North Wollo, a province whose name was once synonymous with famine. “We will avoid this problem without evacuating areas.”
….. The Overseas Development Institute, a British think-tank, puts much of Ethiopia’s ability to deal with drought down to its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), Africa’s largest social-protection scheme. Set up in 2005, it puts around 6m able-bodied men and women to work for five days a month on public works, such as digging waterholes for animals or building terraces for crops. In exchange, their households and those of more than 1m less able citizens receive food or cash amounting to 13kg of cereal and 4kg of pulses a month for the leanest half of the year
Still waiting for the African Green Revolution.
kenopalo.com 