Getachew Diriba: Overcoming Agricultural and Food Crises in Ethiopia: Institutional Evolution and the Path to Agricultural Transformation
Imprint: Independently published, Printed in the United States of America, 2018, 447 pp, $39.95. ISBN 9781980310983
Reviewed by Teshome Hunduma and Selam Hailemichael
In April 2018, the World Bank announced that Ethiopia has experienced strong and broad-based economic growth averaging 10.3 percent a year from 2005/06 to 2015/16, compared to a regional average of 5.4 percent. Their official statistics estimates Ethiopia’s gross domestic product (GDP) to have rebounded to 10.9 percent in the 2017 fiscal year(World Bank 2018). Similarly, Ethiopia is said to have registered the fourth highest annual average agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa along with poverty reduction in the period between 2000 and 2013 (AGRA 2016). Poverty rate is thought to have declined from 55.3 percent to 33.5 percent in the same period (World Bank 2017). As a result of these achievements, Ethiopia is said to have either achieved or is on track to achieving six out of eight Millennium Development Goals (ADB 2017). Encouraged with higher economic growth and poverty reduction in both urban and rural areas, the World Bank renewed its country partnership framework for the period 2018 – 2022 to support Ethiopia’s quest to achieve lower middle-income status by 2025 (World Bank 2018).
In contrast to this optimism, Getachew Dirba gives a sombre presentation of the Ethiopian agricultural sector in his book Overcoming Agricultural and Food Crises in Ethiopia: Institutional Evolution and the Path to Agricultural Transformation. The book’s central message is that smallholder agriculture in Ethiopia, with its reliance on backward technologies that need to ‘disappear into historical archives’ (p.108), is ‘no longer a threat only to the survival of individuals, rather…..represents an existential threat to the nation as a whole’ (p.31). The book is meant for wide range of actors towards fostering dialogue among Ethiopians which Getachew believes is urgently needed about the continuing food crisis, lack of technological change, declining land availability and worsening terms of trade for farmers’ produce. Getachew believes that such dialogue is important to identify previously neglected processes of incremental and endogenous institutional change, for creating synergy among actors, and for establishing effective and accountable institutional rules, policies, programs and financial arrangements.
The book has eleven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 give an overview of the core problems that the author sees in Ethiopia’s smallholder agriculture as well as the conceptual basis for ensuing arguments. This is where the author adds a sentimental touch to the story he is building by referring to the situation of agrarian life in the village he was born and raised which he believes has improved little after over half a century. The author explores aspects of performance (the capacity to provide income for livelihood, risk management and investment in innovation and technological changes), structure (political and economic institutions, demography and societal ideology that affect performance) and evolution (temporal change in structure and performance) as conceptual lens for reviewing the institutional setup around agricultural transformation. He describes these as the three pillars needed ‘to articulate the origins of agricultural and food crisis in Ethiopia’ (p.31) together with an integrated institutional approach focusing on changes in formal and informal institutions, technologies, and related social and behavioural norms. The author insists that analysis at such a depth is necessary to understand the deep-rooted institutionalization and persistence of traditional farming practices in the 21st century causing Ethiopia to remain ‘like an island in the middle of industrial and digital technologies’ (p.31). Furthermore, he argues that there has to be a parallel institutional transformation for Ethiopia to absorb technological and social change. Chapter 3 is focused on tracing the origins of Ethiopian agriculture to prehistoric times to make case that it has changed little from its ‘antiquity’ (p.72) serving as an ‘open museum’ (p.22) of the Neolithic age inventions. The chapter is informative in relation to its historical account of the debate on whether Ethiopia is a centre of origin for the domestication of different crops and animal species.
In chapter 4, Getachew traces the origin, development, and expansion of commonly used agricultural equipment in the Ethiopian smallholder agriculture. He describes the different efforts put into improving the ard-plough each of which failed because of not considering the financial capacity of the farmer, the physical strength of the ‘undernourished’ farmer and his ‘skinny’ oxen, or their indigenous knowledge (pp.103-107). Describing the different cultivation, processing, storage, and transportation tools, management practices, and current levels of modern input use, Getachew places Ethiopian agriculture at level 1 and 2 (predominance of hand and draught power) of a recently established 12 staged levels of agricultural mechanization (p.121). A review of the creation and evolution of Ethiopia’s modern agricultural institutions and agricultural performance during the feudal period (1900-1974), era of socialism (1974 – 1991) and democratic developmentalism (1991-2018) are the focus of the book in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 respectively. In chapters 8 and 9, Getachew discusses the nature and origins of agriculture and food crises using quantitative data on household farm size, production and consumption as a measure of agricultural performance. He uses the concepts of crisis, survival and renewal thresholds for scrutinizing the capacity of Ethiopian smallholder agriculture to provide dietary energy requirement, meet expenditures, and for risk management. The author concludes of a situation of chronic consumption deficits and undernourishment for millions of Ethiopians and blames the persistence of the ard-plow and hoe agriculture as reasons for these crises. The author presents a series of lessons on resolving crises from medieval European, the Axumite civilization, and contemporary China’s agricultural transformation in Chapter 10. In the final chapter, the author offers recommendations and action plans for agricultural transformation, and to inform the dialogue on Ethiopia’s smallholder agriculture.
By most accounts, Getachew’s book is comprehensive. The effort put into composing an account of the Ethiopian smallholder agriculture and the institutions surrounding it from cultural, religious, historic, and archaeological angles is commendable. The author’s rural upbringing, carrier path, as well as professional experiences give weight to his insights. Some of his criticism and honest account deserve acknowledgement. The book is well written and readable making it a valuable resource to anyone interested in getting a broad-spectrum introduction to Ethiopian agriculture and its various issues. Nevertheless, the book has several shortcomings. Without trying to be exhaustive, we mention those we believe to be core within this review.
The main point that the author makes is that Ethiopian smallholder agriculture has not experienced significant technological change since the Stone Ages and the reason for this ‘stagnation’ is found within what the author calls the ‘Ethiopian institutional culture’. The author uses the examples of the Ethiopian railway and the Ethiopian Airlines to show the ‘Ethiopian institutional culture’ at its worst and its best respectively. For the author the ‘institutional decay’ (p.64) the Ethiopian railway system experienced after six decades of service is a good analogy to the Ministry of Agriculture (and the smallholder agriculture) since it has been sucked into the ‘national norms’ (p.53). These ‘national norms’ are characterized by rigidities, mistrust of foreigners and their inventions, religiosity, constrained critical thinking, and absence of cognitive capacity (pp. 58, 59, & 64). Of the different institutions, the author goes to length to discuss Christianity and its (mainly negative) influence on some aspects of the society including critical thinking. To the author, the persistence of the Ge’ez language in the Orthodox Church is comparable to the persistence of the ard-plough in Ethiopian agriculture as examples that practices are accepted without question in Ethiopia (p.59). The author does recognize ancient Ethiopia as a source of civilization, innovation, and creativity that was advanced for the times, which have since disappeared mysteriously resulting in the present ‘uncritical’ society. In fact, the secret to the success of the Ethiopian Airlines, the author tells us, is that it managed to remain Ethiopian only in ‘identity’ while staying out of the Ethiopian institutional culture opting instead to adopt ‘the organizational culture of its partners outside of Ethiopia’ (p.69). The book does not specify who these ‘partners’ with superior culture are, but one can infer that the author is referring to the airlines’ American counterparts. Therefore, the main cause of the ‘spectacular failure’ of the railway (and by way of analogy, Ethiopian smallholder agriculture) is its insistence to remain Ethiopian in both identity and culture. Furthermore, the author sees no problem in drawing a parallel between the Ethiopian railway and agriculture. We are told the former’s mistake was its complete negligence of the need to invest in local skills. In the case of the agricultural sector, the author himself acknowledges the sustained effort that went into training the work force, upgrading the technologies, as well as the gradual increase in the use of modern inputs. Getachew insists these investments are no longer enough considering that agricultural crisis is now posing an ‘existential threat’ to the nation. The nationwide unrest seen since 2015, we are told, is a direct result of the lack of innovation and transformation in agriculture. The author maintains that the way out of this conundrum, is through creative destruction, specifically land consolidation, mechanization, urbanization, and industrialization, while traditional agricultural tools vanish into ‘archives’ and ‘museums’.
The problem with Getachew’s diagnosis and remedy is, to use his own terms, his ‘wilful ignorance’ that creative destruction lies at the heart of the grievances seen all over Ethiopia (not just the smallholder farmer) leading to the unprecedented political changes we are witnessing in the country today. Dispossession of smallholders of their land to consolidate these for large-scale investments, urbanization, and industries were the central reason for the massive protest that have occurred around the capital and other places (Rahmato 2011; Abbink 2016; Záhořík 2018). Getachew claims that Ethiopian governments have feared to expose the smallholder sector to the forces of creative destruction (p.21). We disagree with this claim since there has not been a time in Ethiopian history when smallholder farmers were not exposed to such ‘creative’ forces be it in the form of forced or ‘volunteer’ villagization and resettlement schemes (Baye 2013), coercive adoption of agricultural inputs (Cafer and Rikoon 2017), and more recently dispossession (Makki 2014) in the name of progress and modernization. Moreover, his claim that ‘no nation has emerged successful…..without modernizing its agriculture’ (p.23) has also been challenged as inaccurate generalisation that is pushed on low-income countries to justify productivist policies (Ellis 2005).
Getachew does not see that mechanization will cause the displacement of labour on page 383, and then he sees that it does on page 386 and recommends social protection programs to take care of those losing in the transformation process. In his call for land consolidation, the author gives little attention to the consequences of exclusion from land or prevention from land access by smallholders (Hall et al 2011). While advocating for the mortgaging and liquidation of land to promote its consolidation, Getachew fails to give further recommendation on options for farmers who should leave their piece of land and where and how to invest the money they get from the sale of their land.
He tells us that despite the different efforts made to modify it, the ard-plough’s persistence lies in its simplicity, appropriateness to the financial capacity and physical strength of the farmer, as well as its accessibility but tells us nothing about how mechanization is a better choice for the undernourished, under resourced smallholder farmer. He criticizes the ‘institutional memory’ that is keeping the ard-plough deeply ingrained in the smallholder’s mind making him resistant to change (p.51), then he talks about the ‘amnesia’ permeating the collective societal memory (p.16 & 25). He calls for specialization (p.378), then disapproves of the loss of genetic diversity in his childhood village (p.16).
Much can be criticized about the inconsistency in Getachew’s arguments, the fallacies in the comparisons he makes, his reliance on crisis narratives to justify the call for extraordinary measures, and the complete disregard to the role of gender in agriculture. Nevertheless, suffice it to say that if anything is to be criticized about the ‘Ethiopian institutional culture’, it is the top-down, dogmatic attitude, uncritical faith in techno-scientific solutions, and the condescending attitude towards smallholder farmers that is rampant throughout the formal agricultural institutions (as also documented by Adem 2012; Lefort 2012; Planel 2014). The tone in Getachew’s book does a good job in depicting this unfortunate culture at its worst since the condescension goes beyond the smallholder towards the culture, faith, and even cognitive capacity of the Ethiopian society. This deterministic view is contrary to the wide set of literature and angles of exploration the book engages with or the professional experience the author outlines.
In the book, the author makes a call for starting dialogue on the subject matter. We hope this review is a positive contribution in that direction.
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Teshome Hunduma Mulesa and Selam Hailemichael work at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).
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