How Mengistu hammers the peasants

The Times, 1 March 1985


Paul Vallely, recently in Ethiopia, identifies one root of the present famine – the government’s doctrinaire shackles on agriculture and marketing

The government men were lying in wait for the peasant farmers in the market place of the small town of Areka.

 The harvest of teff, Ethiopia’s staple grain, had not been plentiful in the southern province of Sidamo but at least that meant, the peasants thought, that they would get a good price for what little surplus they had.

 They were reckoning without the fixed-price marketing strategy of Colonel Mengistu’s revolutionary government.

 There was almost a riot in Areka that day.  The officials from the Agricultural Marketing Corporation waited until most of the peasants had brought their teff into the dusty market place and then made themselves known.  They announced the official price they had decided on and told the farmers that the AMC would buy their entire stocks.

 The price was ludicrously low. The peasants protested. Some even began to gather up their grain saying they would rather not sell at such a price.

 The AMC men then announced that no one would be allowed to withdraw his produce. The farmers began to shout and drag their grain away. The AMC men were jostled. Then the government heavies moved in and the peasants knew they had no choice but to comply.

 The incident was far from isolated, and the AMC pricing system is not the only policy of the Ethiopian government which compounds the difficulties faced by a country where, according to independent estimates, 500,000 people have died in recent months and 8,00,000 more are at risk of dying from starvation.

 It would be misleading to imply that all or even the bulk of responsibility for the Ethiopian famine could be laid at the door of inefficient and inappropriate socialist policies. Shortly before I left Ethiopia I flew over large tracts of the desiccated provinces of Tigre and Wollo.

For hours the picture below was unchanging: plains which formerly were described as the breadbasket of the north were covered in a rolling mist of what was once fertile top soil; eddies of spiralling dust rose in whirlwinds hundreds of feet into the air; stony river beds at the bottom of gorges a thousand feet deep showed not a sign of water or new vegetation; and the grazing of land at the top of the plateaux which the dried out rivers dissected were as bald and brown as old felt.

“There is no way that land like this can be made fertile in times of drought.  If it does not rain then crops cannot be made to grow economically,” an irrigation expert from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization told me. “Even if there was water at the bottom of those gorges it would cost a fortune to raise it, it would be cheaper just to buy crops for the people every year. ”

Relief shipments forced to wait until arms are unloaded.  It would be a mistake to aggrandize Mengistu’s military regime with the suggestion that there was much any government could have done to prevent a natural catastrophe on such a scale.  But it would be equally mistaken to pretend that the Dergue’s sense of priorities in its management of the country’s resources would find acceptance in many of the donor countries, which the colonel criticized this week for sending insufficient aid.

Perhaps the most offensive example, to western sensibilities, of these distorted priorities is the amount which the military regime spends on arms as its people starve.  International observers estimate that 46 per cent of the country’s gross national product goes on the armed forces.

 Certainly the regime is brazen in its demonstration that military hardware is more important than food aid.  In the first week I was in Ethiopia two Soviet ships, the Valentina Tereshkova and the Captain Modsityvanov, docked at the port of Assab. Their cargo included 45 tanks, tons of artillery, small arms, ammunition and bombs.

 Despite a previous government undertaking that three berths would be available at all times for relief shipments, two other vessels, the Baltic Skou carrying 16,000 tonnes of bagged Australian wheat, and the Knin, carrying 24,500 tonnes of Canadian grain, whose arrival was scheduled well in advance, were forced to wait at anchor for several days until the arms were unloaded.

 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that political factors also override humanitarian considerations in the government’s policy to resettle 1. 5 million peasants from the drought affected regions of Tigre and Wollo in the north and Sidamo in the south.

 It is not that resettlement is a bad thing in itself – these areas are overpopulated and agriculturally exhausted, and a carefully prepared voluntary migration makes sense to many of the relief organizations. But the way the military regime is going about its current programme lends credence to suggestions from the Tigre People’s Liberation Front that the government is taking advantage of the famine to rob the rebellion of its natural supporters.

 For example, it withholds grain from refugee camps for weeks on end but provides two cooked meals a day at resettlement transit camps half a mile away; when this fails, families are split up and the men ordered at gunpoint into lorries and planes, even though provision for their resettlement at their destination is far from adequate.

Certainly the scheme has obvious advantage to the socialist planners. Until now many peasants have shown a marked reluctance to join in the government’s latest re-organisation of agriculture which attempts to induce peasant associations to band together in producer co-operatives in a three-stage plan offering increasing financial incentives. In one district I visited, Damot Wayde, in Sidamo, only 240 of the area’s 5,000 farmers had volunteered to participate at even the first stage.

 But resettlement will uproot these independent-minded farmers, well established in their individual holdings in the northern highlands and the Sidamo plateau, and replant them in an area of farmers’ co-operatives in the west where they will become more amenable to collective manipulation, much as the Russian peasants did under Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

 That Stalin’s stratagem produced few positive economic results but was a resounding success in terms of asserting control over politically recalcitrant peasants will cause few qualms to Colonel Mengistu’s politburo.  Resettled farmers will be more amenable to manipulation.

The Dergue’s management of the agricultural economy is another sector of policy-making which, western agronomists working in Ethiopia maintain, has contributed to the lack of real growth in food production over the past 10 years.

 It is not just that 90 per cent of all investment goes into state farms which continue to produce a mere 4 per cent of the country’s needs, with virtually no investment in peasant agriculture.   They point to fundamental flaws in the post-revolutionary system.

 There are between 200 and 400 farmers in each of the peasant associations, sometimes called, like their urban workers’ counterparts, kebeles. The kebele committee has wide administrative and judicial powers to redistribute land. Plots are allocated according to the size of a farmer’s family and take into account the fertility of the land, this can mean that an individual’s holding is fragmented, with some good land and some bad. Fair, certainly, but inefficient.

 More seriously, also in pursuit of fairness, this year’s plots are not necessarily reallocated to the same people next year thus creating a real disincentive to fertilizing the land, improving drainage, clearing boulders or building anti-erosion terraces.

 Nor does the government’s taxation system help. Nothing has been done substantially to reduce the national land tax of around £40 a year, on average, which is a considerable percentage of the mean annual income of £150. It is hardly surprising then that this year many peasants are defaulting.

 The result is that their draught oxen and cattle are rounded up into the kebele pound until they can come up with the money. If they cannot find it they are imprisoned. One agricultural aid worker in the south in a recent tour of 12 kebeles discovered that in three cases the entire kebele committee had been taken to jail because their members had been unable to pay taxes.

 But it is in the price control policy of the Agricultural Marketing Corporation, which provoked the Areka market place drama, that lies the greatest disincentive to breaking the vicious circle of subsistence.

 The system is designed to provide cheap food for the cities and, in particular, the capital, the government’s political power base. The cities need some compensation for their 40 per cent unemployment.  Cheap food is Mengistu’s answer.

 The AMCs basic fault is that it works from the top down rather than the bottom up. It begins by deciding how much food the country need’s in a given year and then passes the instruction down through the system to the individual farmer, who will be told that the AMC requires, say, 50 kilos of sorghum, teff , coffee from him that year.

Nearer harvest time it tells him the price it will pay – sometimes not until he reaches the market place with his produce.   The differential between the official price and what the farmer could get on the open market is often dramatic.

 So demanding are the AMCs quotas that many farmers find that little or nothing remains for sale as a surplus on the open market.  On some occasions the fixed price is actually lower than the cost of production.

 It is, as one agricultural economist put it, the most powerful disincentive imaginable to persuading farmers to do anything more than produce the minimum amount of grain they need to keep their families alive until the next harvest.  Thus, through wilful misdirection of resources, lack of imagination, rigidity of method, and the type of ideological obsession which puts policies before people, the cycle of subsistence in the Ethiopian highlands is maintained.

 It is a mode of existence in which there are no reserves and where otherwise tolerable climatic variations come to mean the difference between life and death. When acts of God and natural disaster are set aside, that is the part of the Ethiopian tragedy for which Colonel Mengistu and his cohorts must take the blame.