(02/4/2012, WOLAYTA-SODDO, Ethiopia)--When you write a column called Rural Revival, it's a rare opportunity to be able to write it occasionally from the perspective of another country. And when it comes to finding a different perspective on rural and agricultural affairs, a place such as Ethiopia is the polar opposite to what we know in Canada.
Unlike Canada, considered one of the most urbanized countries in the world, with about 80 per cent of its population living in cities and towns, Ethiopia's urban-rural breakdown is almost exactly the reverse. It is a distinctly rural country with agriculture making up nearly half of its GDP and 80 per cent of its exports. It's one thing to know the population numbers; it's quite another to grasp the magnitude of so many people attempting to survive on limited resources.
There is no such thing as "putting the pedal to the metal" -- at least not in the more densely populated regions -- when you hit the wide-open spaces in a country of 80 million people inhabiting an area about twice the size of Texas. There are simply too many pedestrians and livestock sharing the roads. The Ethiopia most of us know is graphic images put there by media coverage of starvation due to famine. But those images are now more than two decades old.
This country has certainly experienced drought since then, and malnourishment is a constant threat among the subsistence farmers that make up most of the country's population. But there has been a concerted effort on the part of government and international non-government aid agencies, including partners of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB) to intervene before these conditions become a disaster.
About a day's drive southwest of Addis Ababa, we enter a district that is known in food-aid circles as the Green Famine Belt. While not lush, there is green growth in the fields and hillsides, forested hillsides and water running in the streams.
Green isn't a colour usually associated with famine. Yet many of these families are less than a month or two away from not having enough to eat at any given time, a factor of their grinding poverty, the region's high population density and an increasingly variable climate. Read more from Winnipeg free press »
Unlike Canada, considered one of the most urbanized countries in the world, with about 80 per cent of its population living in cities and towns, Ethiopia's urban-rural breakdown is almost exactly the reverse. It is a distinctly rural country with agriculture making up nearly half of its GDP and 80 per cent of its exports. It's one thing to know the population numbers; it's quite another to grasp the magnitude of so many people attempting to survive on limited resources.
There is no such thing as "putting the pedal to the metal" -- at least not in the more densely populated regions -- when you hit the wide-open spaces in a country of 80 million people inhabiting an area about twice the size of Texas. There are simply too many pedestrians and livestock sharing the roads. The Ethiopia most of us know is graphic images put there by media coverage of starvation due to famine. But those images are now more than two decades old.
This country has certainly experienced drought since then, and malnourishment is a constant threat among the subsistence farmers that make up most of the country's population. But there has been a concerted effort on the part of government and international non-government aid agencies, including partners of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB) to intervene before these conditions become a disaster.
About a day's drive southwest of Addis Ababa, we enter a district that is known in food-aid circles as the Green Famine Belt. While not lush, there is green growth in the fields and hillsides, forested hillsides and water running in the streams.
Green isn't a colour usually associated with famine. Yet many of these families are less than a month or two away from not having enough to eat at any given time, a factor of their grinding poverty, the region's high population density and an increasingly variable climate. Read more from Winnipeg free press »
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