Word: aid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Western Europe, acknowledged that farmers have to be given financial incentives to produce more. With the continent $200 billion in debt to the West, the lending nations have not hesitated to twist arms. The E.C. and the World Bank are currently withholding $250 million in development aid for Ethiopia until its leaders agree to raise artificially low prices for agricultural products and allow farmers to sell more of their products on the open market. "For humanitarian aid, there are no conditions," says an E.C. spokesman. "For structural aid, there are conditions...
...Ethiopia, says Jay F. Morris, deputy U.S. AID administrator, "the problem is fundamental. They are taking a bad ecological situation and making it worse. By forcing farmers who do grow more than they consume to sell to the state at prices below the cost of production, they are not providing the incentive to produce the maximum that the land, however poor, would yield." Ethiopia's food production now totals 6.8 million tons a year, with little prospect for future growth; Western experts say the country will require an estimated 2 million tons of imported food in 1990. It almost seems...
...Mengistu's tyranny were not bad enough, the secessionist rebels in famine-threatened Eritrea are now showing that they too can and will interfere with United Nations food shipments. Says Manuel Pietri of the Paris-based International Aid Against Hunger: "There is a perverse game between the government and the rebels to make aid not work, unless, of course, they can turn it to their own advantage." But the stronger of the two parties, Mengistu's government, is the source of most of the trouble. Says an aid official in Washington: "I'll tell you what the government's three...
This sense of Ethiopia as a bottomless sinkhole for Western aid inspires some skeptical experts to wonder whether such assistance is really wise. Regular international rescue efforts do little to encourage recipients to learn to feed themselves, the skeptics argue, and a tougher approach just might force Ethiopia to mend its ways. "What will aid do?" asked Britain's Economist last month. "It will strengthen the dominion of Ethiopia's ignorant rulers. The weather is the only calamity not directly caused by Colonel Mengistu . . . and his cronies. Their Russian advisers have taught them to run vast state farms that produce...
...what? "The aid Ethiopians need is diplomatic pressure, not food," says Rony Brauman of Doctors Without Borders, a French charitable organization that was expelled from Ethiopia two years ago for criticizing Mengistu's brutally handled program to resettle residents of rebel-threatened areas. "If we have a duty, it is to pressure the government to change its policies. Otherwise, in two or three years, we're going to see the same bodies, the same TV footage, the same appeals from humanitarian agencies to come to the rescue." But as a French government official asks, "Who is going to take...