Like a patient addicted to pain killers, Ethiopia seems hooked on aid

Peter Greste:

For most of the past three decades, it has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash.

It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time.

Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined.

Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.

Ethiopia is so poor that it takes one bad rainy season to tip millions more into crisis.

Even though the last harvest was relatively good, 1m people in the eastern Somali region are in need of urgent help.

"Droughts have always been a fact of life in this region," says economist Dessalegn Rahmato of the Forum for Social Studies in the capital, Addis Ababa.

"But it used to be on a cycle of 25 to 30 years. Now, that has been reduced to four or five years. Yet we still don't seem to be able to cope with that basic fact of life."

Why, with so much international support, have things gotten worse and not better?

Woldu Menameno, a farmer in the Tigre region of northern Ethiopia, believes he knows at least part of the answer.

"For years things were very bad. There was plenty of aid, but people were lazy. They just had the food and sat in their places," he says.

"They didn't participate in anything, but just counted the days. They sat in their houses, dreaming of how to get more food."

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