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thiopia’s economy depends on agriculture. Over 80pc of its more than 90 million people very much depend on this sector.
Over the last two decades, agricultural production has been on the rise at varying growth rates. With agriculture being the bedrock of the economy, a slight change in percentage share translates into a huge amount in production or scarcity.
For the last few years, the country has made a big stride in transforming the old ox-driven ploughing methods and is adopting better technology and improved inputs to boost production. The rain-fed agriculture is being augmented by irrigated farming. Horticulture production is also making an impact in the foreign exchange earnings.
Despite all the efforts being exerted to transform the subsistence form of food production over the past years, the price of grains, fruits and vegetables as well as meat and dairy products has soared increasingly from year to year.
Please pose this non-political question to Demissie Chanyelew (PhD) like one foreign correspondent did last week. He was first asked if the last six month’s assessment of 6.6pc production growth rate was fair. His answer was affirmative as substantiated by international organisations.
He was then asked why the price of food keeps increasing. Judging by the tone of his voice, he sounded too cautious like he was trying to avoid any political insinuation or hypocrisy, a common feat of so called intellectuals these days. He said, “I think change in lifestyle and change in consumption behaviour could be an explanation.”
Those answers may beg for more questions than give answers. To produce food and be able to feed the people on the farm and supply additional production for the market is not only a matter of having land, labour and water. It involves productivity, efficiency, pre and post harvest care to avoid loss. Some export oil seeds will fall in the negative yield territory unless they are harvested rapidly before they are even fully ripe.
By the courtesy of Tesema Astatkie (Prof), the statistics expert of Dalhousie University in Canada, Post Harvest Loss (PHL) was included in the Post Graduate Studies programme of Jimma University in 2008, with the funding help of the Government of Canada. It is now over eight years since the project was first launched in Ethiopia. It is interesting to note that the Ethiopian government has considered PHL as part of the Growth & Transformation Plan (GTP).
It was learnt that in a study conducted at a small farm in Dedo, some 25 km east of Jimma, perishable horticulture products like cabbages show a loss of up to 80pc.
In addition to PHL efforts, irrigation is also expanding. Irrigation farming has become one of the most rapid ways of not only earning money from export products but also the optimization of land and water. Potatoes, onions, carrots, tomatoes, radishes and other products for quick consumption are being cultivated through irrigation.
This also matches better with the overall income of the people. Even then, in a country where the majority of the population lives below the two dollar a day level, we cannot talk about “change in lifestyle and taste of consumption”. Cheaper items are not only marketable but also nutritional.
On the other hand, the yields of irrigation agricultural products, particularly those perishable ones, have to be stored and transported to the market on time. Cereals may be stored at least until they are marketable at desired prices. This fact encourages farmers to hoard.
Telling us that the season’s production has grown by 6.6pc does not necessarily mean that all the products come to the market simultaneously. Tessema’s research works have earned him accreditation from a number of international organisations.
It is a genuine look into the problems professionally, as Tessema is a statistician accredited by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) that helps clear policymaking. Attributing problems to unsubstantiated reasons cannot help to solve them.
This issue becomes even be more important when it entails the livelihoods of millions of people. That is why educated people such as Demessie ought to be qualifying their reasoning against facts and contexts. It is only from such educated qualification that interventions, such as the PHL effort introduced by Tessema, can be created.
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