As the Economist explains, erratic weather in East Africa has again left Ethiopia in a famine, not one to the level of the mid-80s, but still severe.
The scale of starvation is so large in part because Ethiopia has virtually no business sector. Therefore families have little if any way to save money for hard times — which come in cycles, are tied to the weather, and are likely to become more severe with climate change.
When rains come at the right time, farmers have food. When they don’t — and that happens often — people starve.
Sound familiar? While Oklahoma doesn’t suffer famine like Ethiopia does, many of the state’s farmers depend on weather patterns that, if anything, are predictably extreme. We have decades of droughts and floods. This is the driest start to a year on record in Oklahoma Panhandle, and many farmers are losing their crops or having to sell of cattle.
Climatologists say it’s hard to make region-specific predictions about climate change. But Deke Arndt, the assistant state climatologist, says this year’s patter of eastern Oklahoma being intensely wet and the Panhandle being incredibly dry is consistent with expectations for a warming world.
Farmers I’ve talked to in the Panhandle say they expect good years and bad years, and sometimes they expect the bad years to be so bad that they won’t have crops. It seems like that kind of long-range planning lets them survive. But I wonder what readers think about our dependency on weather to give us food and money. Do we need better planning, and if so, what would that entail?
Here’s an excerpt from the Economist article on Ethiopia:
A famine on the scale of 1984, when Band Aid and Live Aid raised about $150m in relief for Ethiopia, is still unlikely. Logistics and medical understanding have improved. Yet, sadly, some of the conditions that created that famine have not really changed. Ethiopia still has too many people eking out a living on too little land, depending on rains that can never be relied on. Meteorologists say that the problem is not just the amount of rain but the climate’s increasing volatility.
The government has also failed. After several good harvests since the last big famine, in 2003, Ethiopia had a chance to progress. Instead, it dithered over reforms to promote private business and overhaul the country’s sclerotic banking system and mobile-phone sector. Aside from coffee, qat (a narcotic leaf chewed by Somalis), horticulture and a little tourism, Ethiopia is one of Africa’s very few countries that still has virtually no serious private business—and thus few jobs—outside the state sector. Almost three-quarters of the population may be under- or unemployed.
So few families have a chance to save anything for hard times. The lack of wealth creation makes the government more vulnerable to external shocks. The soaring price of oil may cost Ethiopia $1 billion this year—equivalent to its entire foreign-exchange earnings. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, cannot be blamed for record oil prices or for the rising cost of food worldwide, both of which have sparked riots in several African countries. But he bears some responsibility for failing to increase his country’s hard-currency earnings.
John