Irrigation Agriculture is the Answer for Famine-not Institutionalizing Begging 

A Brief Observation by: Yared November 29, 2002 

While I was reading the Ethiopian government’s main News Paper “Addis Zemen” a few days a go, I came across a surprising statement. The paper praises the Ethiopian government for informing the International community about the present drought but blasts the world for not extending its helping hands for drought victims on time. 

What baffles me here is whether “Begging” has gradually become a normal thing to do and not as some thing to be embarrassing for the country. According to the government’s view, ensuring food security in Ethiopia is the primary responsibility of International donors and not that of an Ethiopian government. As far as the government is concerned it is only enough to inform donors about any food shortages in the country. For this “grand” (rather humiliating) objective the government has created the so-called “early-warning institutions”, offices, and wastes a lot of resources not in combating the root cause of famine but on the institutionalization of begging. 

It is a self-degrading culture to say the least. I am not objecting entirely the use of few efficient offices in information gathering on draught. I am only troubled by the apparent negligence in channeling more resources to expand irrigation farming. If the government was serious in tackling famine it could have invested a lot of its resources in expanding irrigation agriculture. Do Morocco and Egypt, for example, care whether it rains or not? What is the secret behind? Clear and simple: Rain-fed agriculture is a thing of the past. 

Why is then, Ethiopia, the source of thousands of Rivers is suffering from drought? As the overseas development minister of UK recently put it correctly, famine is just the result of “mismanagement” and bad governance. In addition to the little attention given to Irrigation farming, the lack of private land ownership has also put a crippling effect in increasing productivity and the flourishing of big commercial farms in Ethiopia. Look where most of the investment in Ethiopia is going these days: hotels, snacks, and more hotels. Almost nothing is going to agriculture where the size of the real cake (GDP) can increase. 

All the limited available private capital is going to sectors that have distributive role in nature. This misallocation of resources is a direct result of the myopic land policy of the government. The government is also wasting a lot of its resources by conducting useless “Derg” era communist type meetings or “Gimigemas” year after year. On the other hand it doesn't have a clue as to how many useful small scale rivers are there in each “Woreda” of the country that can be utilized for irrigation farming. It doesn't have an idea about the opportunity cost of those endless and useless cadre meetings. How much money is spent to conduct such meetings in terms of wages, salaries and daily allowances for the last 11 years? How many of those meetings were useful in enhancing development activities? Sometimes the prime-minister (Ato Meles) sounds like a well-trained Economist in his speeches and interviews, but I am not sure whether he understands the simple concept of opportunity cost of time? 

If one is a real Economist he would not allow such colossal west of time and scarce resources while he is in office and in charge of the country’s affairs. I would like to give a very simple assignment for our prime minister (if he doesn't mind of course). Please try to do some calculation in your spare time, by estimating the opportunity cost of conducting endless and useless meetings in terms of the number of dams that could have been built for agricultural use, had all those wasted resources were saved and channeled towards Irrigation agriculture. 

Here are some inputs: 

1. Come up with an estimated number of meetings and (Gimigemas) from “Kebele” and “Woreda” to “Federal” level in Addis Ababa in just one single day.
2. Take in to the assumption that government officials spend almost 3 of the 5 working days of a week in meetings or the so-called “Gimgemas”. 
3. Multiply the number of each day’s meetings by 3 and also multiply this by 52 weeks. 
4. Take an average number of participants in a meeting and the monetary cost of each person in terms of wages and salaries and additional daily allowances. 
5. Multiply that by the average number of participants. 
6. Multiply that by the number of meetings (or Gimigemas, whatever you call them!) in just one day in Addis Ababa.
7. Take that figure and multiply it by 3 working days and then by 52 weeks.
8. Take this last figure and multiply it by the number of states (15, I guess) in the country taking Addis Ababa as a an approximate gage factor. 
9. Add to this value the cost of those useless international “Water Seminars” held in Addis Ababa and elsewhere in the world involving government officials, which were followed by no action at all. 
10. Do that for 11 years and get an approximate total value. 
11. Take the average cost of a small size dam. 
12. Divide the total value you computed on Number 10 by the average cost of one dam. You may now have arrived at a staggering opportunity cost of endless meetings and “Gimgemas” in terms of the number of “forgone Irrigation dams.” That is what they call misallocation of resources in the literature. 

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