A familiar story of looming famine is filtering out of East Africa. Again, a World Summit on Food Security this week is addressing the symptoms but not the causes. Part of the cause is years of poor rains: Few African farmers have irrigation and in Ethiopia 90 percent of agriculture is rain-dependent. But farmers in other parts of the world routinely face droughts yet avoid famine.
Before 1800, however, famine was a common cause of death around the world. Most people everywhere 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 bad conditions persisted, they died.
This cycle changed slowly in Western Europe as urbanization increased and people specialized in making certain goods that they traded with others who also specialized. Output increased and competition drove innovation, further increasing output. Agricultural production rose dramatically and famine declined.
Two European famines of the 19th century stand out as exceptions: Ireland from 1845 to 1852 and Finland from 1866 to 1868. Both were caused by oppressive governments restricting the rights of individuals to own land and to trade: Subsistence farming, combined with disease and bad weather, killed hundreds of thousands.
Since the 1920s, global deaths from drought-related famines have fallen by 99.9 percent. The reason? Continued specialization and trade, which have multiplied the amount of food produced per capita and have enabled people in drought-prone regions to diversify and become less vulnerable.
But where governments in Africa prevent the free movement of goods and people and where land rights are limited or insecure, people have few opportunities other than eke out a meager living. Ethiopia is a prime example: Government is mainly responsible for the repeating disasters.
In 1975, the socialist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam nationalized all rural land in Ethiopia, disrupting complex and troubled imperial tenure as well as evolved customary land tenure. The stated aim was to seize land from exploitative owners, provide farmers with rights to use land, create agricultural cooperatives to feed the country, and keep people out of cities.
It failed. Exploitation was traded for oppression. Without incentives to improve the land, output fell sharply and trade was outlawed. Under Mengistu, farmers were not allowed to put crops aside for the bad times, nor money from their sales. Entrepreneurs were not allowed to move food to areas where it was most needed. These were all considered anti-social capitalist practices. When drought struck in 1983, as it does periodically, millions were unable to get enough food and hundreds of thousands died.
Has the government of Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s prime minister since 1991, learnt the lessons of 1983?
Meles’ government has hardly changed the Mengistu policy of government ownership of land. Under the 1995 Constitution, farmers continue to have use rights but not ownership rights. They cannot therefore mortgage their land, so they cannot securitize loans for inputs to raise yields (eg, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation); hence, the interest they are charged is much higher.
Nor are they able sell their land to move in search of greater economic opportunity. Instead, families have no choice but to subdivide the land they use into smaller and smaller plots for their adult children. A host of ill consequences follow: Families must deplete their limited savings or sell other property in order to survive; continuous subdivision leads directly to environmental degradation and lower crop yields which, of course, worsen hunger. And, finally, efficient farmers are not allowed to buy property and build larger and more productive farms.
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