Visiting USAID head urges "substantial" reform

Ethiopia must privatise its land to help fight future famines, Andrew Natsios, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said on Saturday. He urged the government to engage in "substantial, widespread, in-depth economic reform" as a means of helping to avert recurrent food crises in the country. "There will come a time when no amount of food aid will be able to deal with the crises unless Ethiopia grows economically," Natsios told a press conference during a three-day visit to Ethiopia, whose greatest single donor is the United States. Over the past year, the US had shipped in 1 million mt of food worth US $525 million, representing about 60 percent of Ethiopia's food aid, he said. Natsios went on to say that the country also needed to ensure that opposition political parties were allowed to compete "on a level playing field" and that no constraints were applied to the media. "We urge the country to move towards a more pluralistic democracy," he stressed. He said when he started working with Ethiopia, a crisis would hit the country every 10 years, then every four years and now every other year. In this respect, he gave an account of the "concerns" which, the United States felt, lay at the root of these crises. Ethiopia is currently reeling from a complex humanitarian emergency that has left 13.2 million people dependent on food aid. Natsios said the government needed to embark on economic reforms to improve the investment climate and attract foreign private sector investment. There must also be reform of the financial sector to enable the country to become "increasingly competitive in the global market place". But to avert future famines, it was essential to improve environmental management and to privatise land. "We in USAID believe there should be a privatisation of land in Ethiopia," said Natsios, while welcoming a recent land-certification scheme launched by the government. The scheme aims to offer greater security to farmers – whose land is owned by the state - and to encourage them to invest more heavily in their farms. The lease guarantee, which comes in the shape of a registration or ownership book, is expected to be for 99 years, with a farmer being entitled to bequeath land to his children. However, the government fears that full privatisation of land could result in speculators taking advantage of impoverished farmers and lead to massive landlessness in rural areas. Natsios, who last visited Ethiopia in January, said the response of the international community and the government to the latest crisis had served to avert a major disaster. "We are, however, concerned about the current malaria epidemic," he added, announcing that the United States would be shipping in drugs to combat the disease. Natsios went on to say that he had been told by President George W. Bush that Ethiopia must have an "ally in the US" to prevent "needless loss of life" in its current crisis. He said millions would have died without the massive food aid intervention to help the millions affected by it.