Wreaking Ethiopia's Peasant Economy, Destroying Biodiversity

excerpted from the book

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, 2003, paperback [first edition 1997]

p137

The "economic therapy" imposed under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction is in large part, responsible for triggering famine and social devastation in Ethiopia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, wreaking the peasant economy and impoverishing millions of people. With the complicity of branches of the US government, it has also opened the door for the appropriation of traditional seeds ... by US biotech corporations, which ... have been peddling the adoption of their own genetically modified seeds under the disguise of emergency aid and famine relief.

Crisis in the Horn

More than 8 million people in Ethiopia - representing 15% of the country's population had been locked into "famine zones". Urban wages had collapsed and unemployed seasonal farm workers and landless peasants were driven into abysmal poverty. The international relief agencies concurred, without further examination, that climatic factors are the sole and inevitable cause of crop failure and the ensuing humanitarian disaster. What the media tabloids failed to disclose was that - despite the drought and the border war with Eritrea - several million people in the most prosperous agricultural regions had also been driven into starvation. Their predicament was not the consequence of grain shortages but of "free markets" and "bitter economic medicine" imposed under the IMF-World Bank-sponsored Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).

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The Promise of the "Free Market"

In Ethiopia, a transitional government came into power in 1991 in the wake of a protracted and destructive civil war. After the pro-Soviet Dergue regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam was unseated, a multi-donor financed Emergency Recovery and Reconstruction Project (ERRP) was put in place to deal with an external debt of close to 9 billion dollars that had accumulated during the Mengistu government. Ethiopia's outstanding debts with the Paris Club of official creditors were rescheduled in exchange for far-reaching macro-economic reforms. Upheld by US foreign policy, the usual doses of bitter IMF economic medicine were prescribed. Caught in the straightjacket of debt and structural adjustment, the new Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE), led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) - largely formed from the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (PLF) had committed itself to farreaching "free market reforms", despite its leaders' Marxist leanings. Washington soon tagged Ethiopia, alongside Uganda, as Africa's post Cold War free market showpiece.

While social budgets were slashed under the structural adjustment programme (SAP), military expenditure - in part financed by the gush of fresh development loans quadrupled since I989. With Washington supporting both sides in the Eritrea-Ethiopia border war, US arms sales spiralled. The bounty was being shared between the arms manufacturers and the agribusiness conglomerates... With mounting military spending financed on borrowed money, almost half of Ethiopia's export revenues had been earmarked to meet debt-servicing obligations.

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Laundering America's GM Grain Surpluses

US grain surpluses peddled in war-torn countries served to weaken the agricultural system. Some 500,000 tons of maize and maize products were "donated" in 1999-2000 by USAID to relief agencies including the World Food Programme (WFP) which, in turn, collaborates closely with the US Department of Agriculture. At least 30% of these shipments procured under contract with US agri-business firms) were surplus genetically modified grain stocks.'

Boosted by the border war with Eritrea and the plight of thousands of refugees, the influx of contaminated food aid had contributed to the pollution of Ethiopia's genetic pool of indigenous seeds and landraces. In a cruel irony, the food giants were, at the same time, gaining control - through the procurement of contaminated food aid - over Ethiopia's seed banks. According to South Africa's Biowatch: "Africa is treated as the dustbin of the world ... To donate- untested food and seed to Africa is not an act of kindness but an attempt to lure Africa into further dependence on foreign aid."

Moreover, part of the "food aid" had been channelled under the "food for work" program which served to further discourage domestic production in favor of grain imports. Under this scheme, impoverished and landless farmers were contracted to work on rural infrastructural programmes in exchange for "donated" US corn.

Meanwhile, the cash earnings of coffee smallholders plummeted. Whereas Pioneer Hi-Bred positioned itself in seed distribution and marketing, Cargill Inc. established itself in the markets for grain and coffee through its subsidiary Ethiopian Commodities." For the more than 700,000 smallholders with less than two hectares that produce between 90 and 95% of the country's coffee output, the deregulation of agricultural credit, combined with low farmgate prices of coffee, had triggered increased indebtedness and landlessness, particularly in East Gojam (Ethiopia's breadbasket).

Biodiversity up for Sale

The country's extensive reserves of traditional seed varieties (barley, teff, chick peas, sorghum, etc.) were being appropriated, genetically manipulated and patented by the agri-business conglomerates: "Instead of compensation and respect. Ethiopians today are getting bills from foreign companies that have "patented" native species and now demand payment for their use." The foundations of a "competitive seed industry" were laid under IMF and World Bank auspices." The Ethiopian Seed Enterprise (ESE), the government's seed monopoly, joined hands with Pioneer Hi-Bred in the distribution of hi-bred and genetically modified (GM) seeds (together with hybrid resistant herbicide) to smallholders. In turn, the marketing of seeds had been transferred to a network of private contractors and "seed enterprises" with financial support and technical assistance from the World Bank. The "informal" farmer-to-farmer seed exchange was slated to be converted under the World Bank programme into a "formal" market-oriented system of "private seed producer- sellers.

In turn, the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute (EARl) was collaborating with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in the development of new hybrids between Mexican and Ethiopian maize varieties." Initially established in the 1940s by Pioneer Hi-Bred International with support from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, CIMMYT developed a cozy relationship with US agri-business. Together with the UK based Norman Borlaug Institute, CIMMYT constitutes a research arm as well as a mouthpiece of the seed conglomerates. According to the Rural Advancement Foundation (RAFI) "US farmers already earn $ 150 million annually by growing varieties of barley developed from Ethiopian strains. Yet nobody in Ethiopia is sending them a bill."

Impacts of Famine

The 1984-85 famine had seriously threatened Ethiopia's reserves of landraces of traditional seeds. In response to the famine, the Dergue government, through its Plant Genetic Resource Centre - in collaboration with Seeds of Survival (SoS) had implemented a programme to preserve Ethiopia's biodiversity. This programme - which was continued under the transitional government - skillfully "linked on-farm conservation and crop improvement by rural communities with government support services". '9 An extensive network of in-farm sites and conservation plots was established involving some 30,000 farmers. In 1998, coinciding chronologically with the onslaught of the 1998-2000 famine, the government clamped down on seeds of Survival (SoS) and ordered the programme to be closed down.

The hidden agenda was eventually to displace the traditional varieties and landraces reproduced in village-level nurseries. The latter were supplying more than 90 percent of the peasantry through a system of farmer-to-farmer exchange. Without fail, the 1998-2000 famine led to a further depletion of local level seed banks: "The reserves of grains [the farmer normally stores to see him through difficult times are empty. Like 30,000 other households in the [Galga] area, his family has also eaten their stocks of seeds for the next harvest."" And a similar process was unfolding in the production of coffee where the genetic base of the arabica beans was threatened as a result of the collapse of farmgate prices and the impoverishment of small-holders.

The famine - itself in large part a product of the economic reforms imposed to the advantage of large corporations by the IMF, World Bank and the US Government - served to undermine Ethiopia's genetic diversity to the benefit of the biotech companies. With the weakening of the system of traditional exchange, village level seed banks were being replenished with commercial hi-bred and genetically modified seeds. In turn, the distribution of seeds to impoverished farmers had been integrated with the "food aid" programmes. WPF and USAID relief packages often include "donations" of seeds and fertilizer, thereby favoring the inroad of the agribusiness-biotech companies into Ethiopia's agricultural heartland. The emergency programs are not the "solution" but the "cause" of famine. By deliberately creating a dependency on GM seeds, they had set the stage for the outbreak of future famines.

This destructive pattern - invariably resulting in famine - is replicated throughout sub-Saharan Africa. From the onslaught of the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the IMF-World Bank had set the stage for the demise of the peasant economy across the region [Horn of Africa] with devastating results. Now in Ethiopia, fifteen years after the last famine left nearly one million dead, hunger is once again stalking the land. This time, as eight million people face the risk of starvation, we know that it isn't just the weather that is to blame.

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