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PART 1 OF 2. Comment to: Gwynne Dyer: Ethiopia's famine tied to population growth

http://www.straight.com/article-253915/gwynne-dyer-ethiopas-famine-tied-population-growth

INTRODUCTION Gwynne Dyer's thought-provoking article complements earlier pieces he has written on Africa and population. Perhaps it's a hallmark of good journalism to prompt readers into exploring further. As a scholar of military history, he's been particularly concerned with how population pressure and growing scarcity of resources promote civil wars in places among the world's highest birth rates, viz., Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopa and Mozambique ("The Population Boom", Telegraph-Journal, Saint John, New Brunswick, March 19, 2007, pg. A.5. Also at: http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Population%20Boom.txt). In "With Every Mistake", Dyer's 2005 compilation of articles, he writes that "[t]he crisis in Africa is real, but its major cause is truly awful governments. Even more than the AIDS epidemic, it is corruption and war that have driven Africa to the bottom of every index of human development during the past forty years [...] About one-fifth of the world is rich, and another fifth is desperately poor and getting poorer, but the middle three-fifths is actually making solid progress - not because of foreign aid or some special political or economic formula, but because it only takes security, sensible government and time for people anywhere to climb the ladder" (p. 350, "The Middle Three-Fifths", originally published August 3, 2003). Dyer prefaces his chapter on Africa in that book with the caveat that while he has "come to care about Africa [...] but too much to maintain the emotional distance that is best if you want to do really good analysis [...] I am not entirely to be trusted when it comes to judging African events, but I do the best I can" (p. 232). I will argue that Mr. Dyer has taken a largely verbatim neoliberal interpretation of Africa.

Development economists are strongly divided these days, just consider the Munk Debate on Foreign Aid, held in Toronto, 2009. Mr. Dyer supports the Washington consensus or "primacy of institutions" camp along with William Easterly and much of the World Bank, emphasising behavioural re-engineering, where Africans have mostly themselves to blame, and must get their own houses in order, foreign aid mostly making things worse. The "geography matters" camp includes Jeffrey Sachs, and while not denying the importance of good governance, deems where people live, geophysical endowments, or lack thereof, an imporant determinant of economic development wholly independent of what humans do with those endowments. It follows Adam Smith's assertion in "The Wealth of Nations" (1776) that Africa's lack of navigable inland access and extremely low coastline-to-land area ratio (one-sixteenth of Western Europe's, one-twelfth of East/Southeast Asia's) isolated most of the continent from ocean-based international trade, with its attendant cross-pollination of ideas (Bloom; Sachs; Collier; Udry. 1998. "Geography, demography and economic growth in Africa", Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1998(2):207-295). With the only large landmass centred on the Equator, Africa's climate - 91% in the tropics, compared to 73% for Latin America and 40% for South Asia - presents a high year-round disease burden to its inhabitants, posing fundamental handicaps to modernisation from the outset. The chicken (physical habitat) came before the egg (human behaviour) so it behooves the rest of the world to lend not just a hand, but a whole lot more hands than presently (Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2005. "The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time", Penguin). Jared Diamond notes Africa's lower biodiversity of domesticable animals compared to Eurasia (only the guinea fowl and donkey were African indigenes), its north-south axis with variable climate and soils and smaller area as key factors which delayed agricultural development in Africa (Diamond, Jared. 1997, 2005. "Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies", 387-401). Either argument, the technocratic solutions are dominated by voices from the West. The climatologist Roger Revelle observed that the world has now become one giant "global experiment" (McElroy, David B. 2010. "Energy: Perspectives, Problems and Prospects", Oxford U.P., p. 322). Lamentably, this means Westerners are mostly wearing the white coats while the Africans are scurrying in the cages.

A ONE MILLENNIUM CONTEXT Ethiopia's current population growth needs to be placed in broader perspective. Between 1820 and 1900, the British-settled colonies of Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand expanded nearly eight-fold, from eleven million to eighty-six million citizens, or an annual rate of growth of 2.6%, five times faster than the global rate; in the previous century, these colonies' growth rate, 1.6% per year, was more than 3.4 times the global rate, and 1.5 times the global rate during 1900-1950. Canada's population grew by 3.1% annually from 1820-70, while the United States was growing at 2.8%/year, including both natural increase and immigration from the Old World; at the same time, Western Europe's population grew 0.7% per year and Africa by 0.4% per year, the latter exactly the world average (Angus Maddison, "Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD", www.ggdc.net/maddison). By comparison, Africa's population grew at its maximum rate of 2.6% for only 50 years, from 1950-2000, while from 1900-1950 at 1.5% and from 1820-1900 at 0.5%; growth has now fallen to 2.3% (2000-2010), and is expected to fall to 2.0% during 2010-2025 (UN. 2009. "World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision", Database, http://esa.un.org/unpp/). England's birth rate remained between 30 and 35 per thousand population between 1750 and 1900, even while the death rate, steady at 26 from 1750 to 1825, began to fall irreversibly after 1825. So in England's case the second stage of the "demographic transition", declining birth rate following declining death rate, took a century and a half (Hayami, Yujiro. 2005. "Development Economics: From the Poverty to the Wealth of Nations", Oxford U.P., p. 68). By comparison, India's birth rate began falling slowly from 50 per thousand in 1900, and their death rate fell from 50 much more precipitously beginning in 1910 (Hayami 2005: 71). Over the period 1500-2009, the Anglophone diaspora's population growth rate was 78% faster than globally, while for Africa just 12% faster.

In terms of population density, both sub-Saharan Africa and North America are still well below the world averages: in 2010, there are estimated to be 36 Africans per square kilometre and 16 North Americans (Canada & USA) per sq. km., compared to 51 globally (http://esa.un.org/unpp/). Even if Africa's population doubles by 2050, as is predicted in the UN's medium variant scenario, and it becomes the second-most densely populated continent after Asia's predicted density of 164/sq.km., Africa's overall density will be 72, compared to 21 for North America and 67 globally. In 2010, among the top one hundred most densely-populated countries, 39 are small states and islands under 500,000 population, while the other 61 constitute 64% of the world population, and of those 61, only eight are African. In the top 100: Rwanda: 24th-highest density, Burundi: 41st, Nigeria: 67th, Gambia: 72nd, Uganda: 76th, Malawi: 80th, Togo: 87th, Ghana: 98th). In 2050, 63 of the 100 densest countries are predicted at the medium variant to contain 66% of world population, and African representation will then increase to 15. In the top 100: Rwanda: 14th, Burundi: 23rd, Uganda: 38th, Nigeria: 47th, Malawi: 48th, Togo: 67th, Benin: 78th, Ghana: 80th, Sierra Leone: 85th, Ethiopia: 86th, Burkina Faso: 88th, Kenya: 90th, Côte d'Ivoire: 93rd, Senegal: 94th, Egypt: 98th). While Ethiopia's overall density in the 2007 census was reported to be 67.2 persons/sq.km., there is however great regional variation, from 6.6 persons per sq. km in Somali region, 15/sq. km. in Afar, 86 in Tigray, 108 in Amhara, up to 589 in Harari Region (Government of Ethiopia, "Ethiopia Population and Development Indicators 2008"; Wikipedia, First-level administrative divisions of Ethiopia). Predominantly single-household agrarian countries like Ethiopia, Burundi and Malawi are, in fact relatively very densely populated because they rely on farmland for survival.

LAND, AGRICULTURE, BIOCAPACITY Dyer has noted that "[Africa is] the last place where there are large areas of good agricultural land that aren't already completely occupied by local farmers. There are usually some peasants scratching a living from the land, but they are few and poor, and they can easily be bought or driven out." ("African Land Grab", 9 May 2009, http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20African%20Land%20Grab.txt). In 2009, the Ethiopian government's Agricultural Investment Agency announced that over the next two years it was offering 3 mill. hectares of arable land in sparsely settled areas, for leases of 40 to 99 years, to large-scale commercial developers ("Ethiopia targets 3 million ha for commercial farms", Reuters News, 5 November 2009). The government estimates the country has 74.5 m. ha. of potentially cultivable land representing 67% of its total landmass of 110 million hectares, yet only 15 m. ha., or 20% of the available farmland (14% of total landmass) are currently being used, mostly as small-holder plots, either subsistence or small-scale cash cropping; the World Bank's World Development Indicators also estimates that 14.0% of Ethiopia's total area was under cultivation in 2007. India is reportedly Ethiopia's largest foreign investor with $4 billion in maize, rice, flower growing and sugar estates. Foreign land investors are free to export their harvested crops, however it is anticipated that much of it will be sold regionally to foreign aid donors such as USAID, and foreign agribusiness is hoped to transition Ethiopia from oxen-ploughed subsistence plots to commercial farming (Xan Rice Bako. 2010. "Ethiopia: In the country of the peasant sickle, land is on offer dirt cheap to agribusiness giants: Addis Ababa rents out vast areas of fertile land to usher in large-scale agriculture: Lease of life?", The Guardian, 15 January 2010, p. 31). Ethiopians reportedly cannot own land, but are granted use certificates for their allocations, making mobility difficult (McCrummen, Stephanie. 2009. "The ultimate crop rotation; Lured by a new business model, wealthy nations flock to farmland in Ethiopia, locking in food supplies grown half a world away", 23 November 2009, The Washington Post, p. A01). Ethiopia is Africa's largest coffee exporter (2% of global exports in 2007 (UN. "2008 International Trade Statistics Yearbook"), and reportedly displaced Zimbabwe in 2009 as the second-largest exporter of cut flowers after Kenya (Mburu, Solomon. 2009. "Can East Europe pick up export slack?", African Business, 1 Dec. 2009). Ethiopia went from 0.5% of the world roses market in 2004 to 16% in 2008 ("More African roses via the Netherlands", FloraCulture International, March 26, 2009) and the IMF estimates it sold $150m. in flower exports in 2009, compared to $317m. in oil seeds and $419m. in coffee exports, receiving $2.2bn. in emigrant workers' remittances and $0.7bn in foreign direct investment (International Monetary Fund. 2009. Country Report No. 09/296, p. 17).

How accurate is the Ethiopian government's estimate of 70m. cultivable hectares? Few studies have been undertaken to quantify the proportion of unutilised farmland in Africa, however, Ethiopia has been calculated by Alexandratos to possess 40.5m. ha. of rainfed and/or irrigable land, based on FAO measurements, about half of which is rated as "very suitable" or "suitable" (Alexandratos, Nikos. 2005. "Countries with Rapid Population Growth and Resource Constraints: Issues of Food, Agriculture, and Development", Population and Development Review, 31(2):237-258). This is only 54% of the Ethiopian government's 74.5m. ha estimate in 2009. Thus, the 15m. ha. in use in 2009 would represent 37% utilisation, and 63% available. The UN's "World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision" (p. 39) predicts the Ethiopian population to go from 83m. (2009) to 174m. (2050), a 2.1-fold increase (1.5%/year), meaning that in 2050, if yields were to remain as they are today, 74% of total available Ethiopian land would be in use and 26% still unused. FAO data show, however, that total Ethiopian cereal crop yields have risen 1.8-fold between 1960-69 (728 kg/ha) and 2000-08 (1,309 kg/ha) while total fertiliser use per capita rose from 0.1 kg (1960s) to 2.5 kg (2000-07) (FAOSTAT). Based on assumptions that 80% of Ethiopian farmland at will remain devoted to cereal crops (chiefly teff) to 2050, that yields per hectare will double between 2000 and 2050, and that the population will grow at 1.9%/year, Alexandratos estimates that the country would be capable of producing 450 kg of cereals per capita in 2050, compared to the actual production of 128 kg per cap. in 1993-2002 - a 3.3-fold improvement, if it were to farm its entire 40.5 m. ha. Of the 12 countries where agriculture exceeds 30% of their economies (Ethiopia's was 44.5% in 2008 - World Bank "Ethiopia at a glance") and the UN 2005 Revision predicted would have the highest 2000-2050 population growth (1.8%/year or more), four (Afghanistan, Burundi, Niger and Uganda) are predicted to have lower cereal productivity in 2050 than in 2000, even when doubling yields and making use of all arable land; in Niger's case, productivity will be 60% less than in 2000, for Afghanistan and Uganda, 22% less. Alexandratos notes, however, that threat of Malthusian scarcity is lower for Burundi and Uganda since cereals provide under one-quarter of calories, the remainder coming from tubers, plantains and bananas. But in the other eight countries, expanding potential ranges from 2.1 times (Benin) and 3.2 times (Burkina Faso) to 8.2 times (Madagascar) and 10.2 times (D.R. Congo) the 2000 cereal production levels. It is plausible that fertile soil goes untilled because traditional Ethiopian ox-driven ploughs cannot turn it, but it may be used for cattle-grazing. The Indian firm Karuturi Global, which has been leased 11,000 ha. in Ethiopia's Oromia State to grow rice, maize, and oil palms, has imported tractors to carry out the work: "the black clay soil is rich in nutrients but difficult to work without a mechanical plough - but some locals had grazed their cattle there and used to cross the farm to the nearest river, which is no longer possible" (Xan Rice Bako. 2010. "Ethiopia: In the country of the peasant sickle...", The Guardian, 15 January 2010, p. 31).

What is remarkable is that African population growth over the last half-century has been largely accommodated by land expansion in rain-fed agriculture. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization data show that Africa's harvested land area more than doubled (102%) between 1961 and 2008 as the African population rose 3.3-fold; by comparison, harvested land globally increased only 13% as the world population rose 117% (FAOSTAT, Production, Crops, Area Harvested). African crop yields (tonnes per hectare) rose only about 30% between the early 1960s and early 2000s, compared to 160% in Asia; this can be attributed to Africa having only about one-tenth the extent of irrigation and fertiliser use as in Asia (World Bank. 2008. "World Development Report", p. 55, 52). Just 1-2% of Ethiopian and Nigerian cultivated land in the early 2000s was equipped for irrigation, compared to 38% in China and 34% in India (FAO, Aquastat Database, Irrigation and Drainage Development). Ethiopia's population also rose 3.3 times between 1961 and 2008, and the FAO reports a 3.1-fold increase in the country's cereal production, based on a 56% cropland increase and 2.0-fold productivity increase. Similar figures are obtained for oil, root and vegetable crops.

Out of 194 countries, Ethiopia in 1990 had the seventh-lowest proportion of its citizens living in urban areas, just 12.6%; only Rwanda (5.4%), Burundi (6.3%), Trinidad (8.5%), Nepal (8.9%), Uganda (11.1%), and Malawi (11.6%) were more rural. In 2010, Ethiopia is ranked eighth-most rural with 17.6% now in urban areas; only Burundi, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, Trinidad, Liechtenstein, Sri Lanka and Niger remain more rural (UNDP. 2010. "Human Development Report 2009", Table L, Demographic Trends, Urban share of the population, http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/indicators/142.html). In terms of dependency ratio - the percentage of children under 15 to the adult population aged 15 to 64 - Ethiopia at 86.5% was the 39th-highest in 1990, and at 80.5% was 16th-highest in 2010, with 12 of the higher-ranking nations being in Africa. This means that for every five adults, there are four children; as fertility rates decline, the ratio will also decline, graduating youth into the workforce, and placing more Ethiopians into the economically-productive age strata. Up to one-third of the Asian tigers' rapid economic growth has been attributed to lowering child dependency ratios (Ringheim, K. 2009. "Ethiopia at a Crossroads", Population Reference Bureau, p. 2), however it remains to be seen what work these young Ethiopian adults will find. Rahmato argues that diversification of labour opportunities away from agriculture will be necessary (Rahmato, Dessalegn. 2007. "La pauvreté et la recherche de la sécurité alimentaire", in: "L'Ethiopie Contemporaine", Karthala, p.285-308).

According to the Global Footprint Network, Africa's measured biocapacity, the ability of its ecosystem (crop and grazing lands, forests, fishing grounds and built land) to provide biologically productive services to humans, is 1.5 hectares per capita, compared to a global average of 1.8; only in terms of grazing land does Africa exceed the average. By comparison, densely-populated Asia's biocapacity is 0.7 ha./cap., Europe has 3.0, Latin America and the Caribbean 5.4 and North America (Canada and the United States) enjoy 5.7 hectares per person. If, as predicted, Africa's population doubles by mid-century, African biocapacity will have declined to that of Asia. Asia's ecological footprint, the current consumption of resources, exceeds its biocapacity by a factor of two at present, while Africa, at 1.4 ha./cap. has a small surplus; at current population growth, it will soon convert to a deficit as well. In 2006, Latin America's surplus biocapacity over consumption, 3.0 ha./cap., exactly balanced the North American overshoot (footprintnetwork.org). For the 126 nations assessed (80% of global landmass), only Canada, Bolivia, Paraguay, Finland, Congo (Brazzaville) and Namibia carry biocapacity which exceeds present their citizens' consumption levels by five or more hectares per person, and those six countries' combined area represents 10% of global landmass. The typical Asian or African currently consumes only 80% of the world's average biocapacity allotment per person (1.8 ha./cap.) while the typical North American is consuming 4.5 times this amount, 8.7 ha./cap ("Ecological Footprint Atlas 2009", p. 37; FAOSTAT, ResourceSTAT, Land). Four and half planet Earths would be required for all to consume at the rate of those in the United States today, or one-half planet Earth if everyone's lifestyle emulated people in India (Global Footprint Network Atlas. 2009. "Ecological Footprint Atlas", p. 37. What this all suggests is that there are regions in the world capable of accommodating the additional one billion Africans in our midst in 40 years' time, along with the two billion additional persons elsewhere (an increase of 32% over 2010). However if we maintain our existing consumption patterns, we will be exceeding the earth's biological capacity by nearly twofold: 2.6 hectare per capita usage will be made upon a reduced biocapacity base of 1.36 hectare per capita. To support such a population will require the collective adoption of consumption patterns equivalent to the typical person living today in Egypt, Iraq, or the Dominican Republic. Alternatively, we could maintain our existing collective consumption if only we reduced our carbon footprint to nil, because that represents exactly 1.4 ha. of our average 2.6 ha. footprint today.

According to demographers at the United Nations, average fertility rates (children born per woman over her reproductive life) for Africa, Asia and Latin America in 1950 were quite similar and high, 6.6, 5.7 and 5.9 respectively, compared to a global average rate of 4.9; by 2005, these continents' rates had fallen to 4.9, 2.5 and 2.5 respectively, compared to a global rate of 2.7 ("World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision", www.un.org/esa/population). So while Asians and Latin Americans over the last half-century have converged onto the global average fertility rate, African families still have twice as many kids. Africa overall has indeed entered the third stage of the "demographic transition" (declining mortality rates, but still high birth rates), but at a slower rate of progress than the rest of the Global South. Fertility rates in some countries, notably South Africa and most of north Africa have fallen by 40% or more over their peak rates; Zimbabwe's and Botswana's fertility declines are in the 25-40% range, while those for Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Sudan are in the 10-25% range (Wikipedia, "Demographic Transition"). In 2004, the UN had predicted that the death grip of AIDS in Africa would lower the projected population for 2050 by 15% (1.63 bn. instead of 1.90 bn.) and by 48%, from 38 m. in the absence of this disease, to 20 m. for the four southern African countries where HIV prevalence is over 20% ("World Population Prospects. The 2004 Revision", Vol. III. Analytical Report, p. 79-80). Revised estimates, accounting for improved access to antiretrovirals and reduced mother-to-child transmission now predict Africa to double its population from 1.01 bn. in 2009 to 2.00 bn. in 2050, with Southern Africa going from 58.0 m. to 67.4 m.; however AIDS will by 2050 have cut the African population by 7.5%, or 130m. fewer than under a hypothetical "No-AIDS" scenario ("World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. Highlights", pp. 2, 14). The same UN data show fertility rates remain highest in Sahelian Africa (the band of savannah below the Sahara) and central Africa (Niger: 7.2, Mali: 6.5, Chad: 6.3; Burundi: 6.8, D.R. Congo: 6.7, Uganda: 6.5; Angola: 6.4). However, in each instance, they have declined by about 15% from peak fertility levels of the 1980s and 1990s, e.g. Mali's peaked at 7.03, and Ethiopia's at 7.55, both around 1994 (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Fertility Data 2008. POP/DB/Fert/Rev2008).

State-level comparisons of rates in the United States and India and province-level in China show similar low-coastal to high-inland fertility gradients, two-thirds higher in inland China and India, 25% higher in the inland USA (e.g., Pison, Gilles. 2009. "Atlas de la population mondiale", Autrement, p. 62, 64-65). It's also been argued that the reason there are sizable African populations so far inland, so distant from the African coast in the first place, in regions with irregular terrains and steep slopes unamenable to cultivation, was as historical refuge, to evade slave-raiding parties which, over five centuries, captured 18 million people destined for the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades; their strategy kept them and their descendents safely on African soil, but relegated to infertile soil with high transport and building costs (Nunn, Nathan; Puga, Diego. 2009. "Ruggedness: The blessing of bad geography in Africa", Dept. of Economics, Harvard University, diegopuga.org, cited in Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. "Common Wealth: economics for a crowded planet", Penguin). Indeed, UN Millennium Development Goal 8C is to "address the special needs of land-locked countries and small island states".

Ethiopia's crude death rate dropped steadily from its first recorded value in 1950 (29.9 per 1,000 population) to 1973 (20.4), but then hovered between 19 and 21 up to 1990; it's fallen steadily since then by about 0.3 deaths per 1,000 per year, reaching 11.7 in 2010 (UN World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision). By comparison, the country's birth rate fluctuated narrowly between 46 and 49 all the way from 1950 to 1995, before declining steadily to 35.7 in 2010 (World Bank, World Development Indicators, Downloaded April 2010). So while Ethiopia's death rate has fallen by 64% since 1950, its birth rate has only fallen 28%, and all of the latter has been only in the last 20 years. This has led to Ethiopia going from an annual population growth rate of 2.2% (1960, doubling time of 31 years) to a peak of 3.4% in 1992 (doubling time of 21 years), and back down to 2.6% in 2008 (doubling in 27 years). So Ethiopia is still growing faster than fifty years ago, and the UN predicts the Ethiopian growth rate will fall below the 1950 level (1.93%), to 1.87% during 2025-30 ("World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision"). Thus, Ethiopia's peak growth rate, an average of 2.7%/year for the 45 years from 1965 to 2010, is less than Angus Maddison's historical estimates of 3.1% for Canada and 2.8% for the USA between 1820 and 1870.

In 1960, at 23.5, India's death rate was just six percent lower than Ethiopia's, but the decline was much more rapid, reaching 10.9 in 1986 (lower than Ethiopia, even in 2008) and 7.4 in 2008. The 1960 Indian birth rate was 0.7% below Ethiopia, but India's declined steadily to 22.8 in 2008. Thus, India's peak population growth of 2.3% (doubling every 30 years) occurred in 1966, three decades before Ethiopia. Data from the Government of India in fact show that the Indian death rate has fallen steadily from a peak of about 49 during 1911-21, while the birth rate has fallen steadily from 50 since 1901-11 (Hayami, Yujiro. 2005. "Development Economics: from the poverty to the wealth of nations", Oxford U.P., p. 71). It's important to note that it took almost 150 years into England's Industrial Revolution for her birth rate to begin falling irreversibly. Birth rates in the United Kingdom went from 30 per thousand in 1750 to a peak of about 36 in 1818, and did not decline below 30 until about the year 1895, even while the death rate had peaked at 28 in 1760, and fell steadily, though slowly to 20 in 1880, and more rapidly since then to 10 by 1950 (Hayami 2005: 68). Infant mortality rates in the UK and US fell significantly only following the public health advances made in the late 1800s (Malmberg, Bo. 2008. "Demography and the Development Potential of sub-Saharan Africa", Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, p. 12). Perhaps there is an element of Western impatience with regard to the African rates?

So why the delay? Why the 40-year gap between, for example, between South America and sub-Saharan Africa in terms of infant mortality, fertility, and population growth rates (Malmberg, Bo. 2008. "Demography and the development potential of sub-Saharan Africa", Nordiska Afrikatinstutet, p. 33). Why the "African fertility exception"? There is no definitive answer, however Jeffrey Sachs and colleagues have found that child mortality rates are the single strongest determinant of Africans' persistently high fertility: in the absence of social security, only when parents are certain the risk of their children dying has fallen permanently, will they choose to have fewer. This relationship holds after differences in malaria infection rates and the introduction year of modern, "Green Revolution" crop varieties are accounted for. On average, Sachs's model predicts a fertility decline from a 2004 average of 5.3 to 3.3 children per woman if the child mortality rate is cut by two thirds; legalizing abortion further reduces the rate by 0.9 offspring, and doubling the percentage of modern seed varieties would lower it by 0.5; collectively such measures would bring African fertility down to 1.9 ("Africa's Lagging Demographic Transition: Evidence from Exogenous Impacts of Malaria Ecology and Agricultural Technology", NBER 12892, 2007). Yet in Ethiopia, the under-five mortality rate went from 230 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1970 to 109 in 2008, a 53% decline; and the proportion of Ethiopians with incomes of $1.25 per day or less (2005 international prices) has dropped steadily from 66% in 1982 to 39% in 2005, making it slightly less than India's extreme poverty rate of 42% in 2005 (World Bank, World Development Indicators). Malarial ecology is also important, because in West and East Africa, the Anopheles gambiae and Anopheles funestus mosquito species bite and feed on human blood (as opposed to animal blood) over 94% of the time, higher than any other malaria-causing mosquito species worldwide, and because these two species alternate between the rainy and dry seasons, malaria afflicts humans year-round; by comparison, India's predominant A. fluviatilis mosquito has a 97% preference for animal blood (Kiszewski, A. et al. 2004. "A global index representing the stability of malaria transmission", Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg., 70(5):486-498). In 2002, the leading seven causes of mortality in Ethiopia, responsible for 65% of all deaths, were lower respiratory infections (13.5% of total mortality, incidence 1.90 times greater than the global rate), HIV/AIDS (13.2%, 2.5), cardiovascular diseases (11.1%, 0.4), Perinatal conditions - low birth weight, etc. (9.0%, 2.0), diarrheoal diseases (6.9%, 2.0), childhood cluster diseases - measles, pertussis etc. (6.6%, 3.3), and tuberculosis (4.5%, 7) (World Health Organization. 2004. "World Health Report 2004", Table 1. Estimated total deaths ('000), by cause and WHO Member State, 2002 (a), December, 2004).

A brief history of Africans, as a percentage of the total human population: 1000: 12%; 1500: 11%; 1700: 10%; 1820: 7%; 1900: 7%; 1950: 9%; 1981: 11%; 2000: 14%; 2009: 15% (Angus Maddison); 2050 (UN est., 2008 Revision): 22%; 2100: 25%; 2300: 24% (UN. 2004. "World Population to 2300", p. 22). By comparison, Northern America's population (Canada & the U.S.A.) first fell from 0.5% (1000 - 1500) to 0.2% (1700), then rose to 1% (1820), 5% (1900), peaking at 6.6% (1950), now at 5% (2009), and predicted to remain there up to 2100, rising slightly to 6% (2100-2300). Pulling back Dyer's telephoto focus on the last decade to the broad five-century sweep of the modern era exposes a forest, the West's responsibility for what is happening today in Africa. If we look at changes in continental populations from 1500 to 2009, we find that the total population of the principal areas of British settlement - Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States - increased 131 times, from 2.8 mill. to 366 mill., compared to a 21-fold increase for Africa (47 mill to 1.0 bill.), according to estimates made by the economic historian, Angus Maddison. Human infestation? Viral profligacy? Pot calling the kettle black? By comparison, Asia grew just 14-fold, Latin America 13-fold, and Europe 7-fold, making the global increase 15-fold (438 m. to 6.76 bn.). The Anglo-settled colonies initially suffered losses of between 20% and 50% of their indigenous populations for the first two centuries, owing to lack of immunity to European diseases, and to warfare. In what became Canada, the population fell from 250,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1700, in the US, from 2 million to 1 million over the same period, and in Australia, from 450,000 to 334,000 between 1700 and 1820 ("Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD", www.ggdc.net/maddison).

In 1500, Maddison's estimates show that Africans comprised 10.6% of the total human population, compared to 13.1% for Western Europe, while Asia comprised 64.7% and England's future settlements (Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand) comprised just 0.6%. In 1913, near the pinnacle of Western Europe's global dominance, its population share peaked at 14.6% of humanity, the "Western offshoots" of Anglo settlements held 6.2%, while Africa's share had fallen to an historical nadir of 7.0%; one century ago then, Europeans and their diaspora outnumbered Africans by three to one, 372 mill. vs. 125 mill. In 2009, Europe's share has fallen dramatically to 6%, Anglo regions have held steady at 5%, and Africa's rebounded to 15%: in other words, we are very nearly back to the same European-stock to African ratio as in 1500 (in fact the shares were 14% Europe & settlements and 11% Africa in 1981)! However, by 2050, the UN predicts the African share will rise to 21%, finally plateauing around 27% from 2100 to 2300, while Europe and North America together will stabilise around 12%. Effectively, the great wave of Western modernity will have doubled Africans' share among humanity (UN. 2004. "World Population in 2300").

But the downward fertility trend, it now appears, is not permanently linked to improved standards of well-being, implying that prosperity isn't driving us inexorably to extinction: for the most highly developed countries in terms of income, education, and life expectancy, fertility rates have reversed their steady decline and over the last two to three decades have begun increasing again. However, at a current average of 1.9, most are still below the replacement rate of 2.1, and Australia, Canada, Japan and several other countries are anomalies, still declining. While the US fertility rate rebounded from a minimum of 1.74 in 1976, steadily back up to 2.05 in 2005, Canada's rate fell from 1.82 children per woman in 1975 to 1.51 in 1999, and has remained there up to at least 2005 (Myrskylä, Mikko et al. 2009. "Advances in development reverse fertility declines", Nature 460, 741-743). These fertility dynamics hold even when "tempo-adjusted" for the trend of postponing having children to the later child-bearing years (although these data for Canada and eight other countries were unavailable).

ETHIOPIAN FAMINES, DROUGHTS, & FOOD INSECURITY Ethiopia has suffered through eleven major famines between 1913 and 2000, with death tolls reaching 100,000 (1957/58), 100,000-200,000 (1973/74), 400,000-1,000,000 (1984/85) and 20,000 (1999/2000). Ethiopian government data show that 11% of the population on average has been vulnerable to famine during 1980 and 2001, with peaks of 20% (1985), 17% (1992) and minima of 5% (1988) and 6% (1996) (Rahmato, Dessalegn. 2007. "La pauvreté et la recherche de la sécurité alimentaire", in: "L'Ethiopie Contemporaine", Karthala, p.285-308). In the 1970s, about 2 million Ethiopians were in need of humanitarian food assistance (6% of population), and in the last decade, the number has increased to peaks of 8 mill. in 2003 (20% popn.), and 15 mill. in 2009 (19% of 80 m. popn.); in mid-2009, there were 6 million are now chronically food insecure, and 9 million seasonally food insecure, 48% of children under five are stunted (heights below the normal range) and 27% of women are malnourished; in drought prone areas the most vulnerable groups typically have the smallest landholdings, are female-headed, and lack oxens (Teller, Charles et al. 2009. "Population Dynamics, Food/Nutrition Security and Health in Ethiopia: Delicate Balance of Vulnerability & Resilience", Poster Session, "International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Marrakech, Morocco, Sept. 2009). Despite having been under a socialist government from 1975, previous inequalities in land area per household appear to have persisted, such that, with the exception of post-reform resettled households, present inequalities in distribution are similar to Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia, and female-headed families and families lacking an ox are more likely to own smaller plots than others, even smaller households (Kebede, Bereket. 2008. "Land Reform, Distribution of Land and Institutions in Rural Ethiopia: Analysis of Inequality with Dirty Data", J. Afr. Econ. 17(4):550-577). The UN World Food Programme reports there have been six major droughts in Ethiopia during the last two decades (http://www.wfp.org/countries/ethiopia). The most recent FAO/WFP mission to Ethiopia estimated that 5.2 m. persons in early 2010 (7% of the population) requiring relief food assistance, possibly rising to 6.5 m. by June, concentrated in Tigray, Somali and Harari regions; noted chronic problems include "land degradation with 50 percent of the highlands believed to be degraded; land pressure resulting in 37 percent of the farming households in the country cultivating less than 0.5 ha and some 87 percent cultivate less than 2 ha; the poverty level with 37 percent of the population [living] below the poverty datum line; and high population growth now estimated at 2.6 percent outstripping the cereal production though growing by more than 10 percent per annum" (FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to Ethiopia, 26 February 2010, Section 5.6.1). Average daily food energy consumption from all food sources during 1961-69 was 1,764 kilocalories per Ethiopian, declining to a low of 1,559 kcal during the 1990s, but it has since rebounded to 1,779 for 2000-2008 and 1,826 in 2008 (FAOSTAT, SUA/FBS, Food Balance Sheets). The US National Academy of Sciences recommends daily energy intakes of 1,848-3,720 kcal (males) and 1,625-3,141 kcal (females) at 30 years of age, depending on stature and level of physical activity (National Academy of Sciences. Institute of Medicine. "Estimated Energy Requirements (EER) for Men and Women 30 Years of Age", in: "Dietary Reference Intakes: Recommended Intakes for Individuals"). FAO data show that the total cereals area harvested per Ethiopian has gone from 0.23 ha. (1960-69) to a low of 0.10 ha. (1990-99) to 0.11 (2000-08) while total fertilizer use per capita rose steadily from 0.1 kg/cap. (1961-69) to 2.5 kg/cap. (2000-07) (FAOSTAT, Production, Crops; ResourceSTAT, Fertilizers, Consumption; PopSTAT, faostat.fao.org). The World Bank states that "land holdings per rural person have more than halved over the past 40 years and a land poor class is emerging — 20 percent of the rural households have not enough land to produce half of their caloric needs" (World Bank. 2008. "Country Assistance Strategy ... Ethiopia", 2008-2011, p. 29). The World Bank estimates that cultivated land as a fraction of total landmass grew from 10% in 1993 (0.19 ha. per cap.) to 14% in 2007 (0.18 ha. per cap.) for a total cultivated area of 14.0 mill. ha. in 2007; forested area declined from 14.7% (1993) to 12.7% (2007), now about one-half of sub-Saharan Africa's average forest coverage of 26.1% (World Bank, "World Development Indicators & Global Development Finance").

Sachs is now arguing for parallel, intensive efforts at child mortality reduction (malaria bednets, for example) and voluntary fertility reduction (encouraged through the green revolution, women's empowerment, widespread availability of legal abortion, contraceptives and sterilisation after desired family size is reached, etc.) to reduce Africa's rate of population growth. He reckons that such measures would bring world population to 8 billion in 2050, not the UN projection of 9.2 billion, and half of this reduction would come from India and sub-Saharan Africa (Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet", Penguin, p. 183).

Gwynne Dyer, with a Ph.D. in military history, concludes his piece with "history is unfair". Is aggressive population control the only possible solution? While Jeffrey Sachs acknowledges Africa's geographical disadvantages for human development, he doesn't react with fatalism, arguing that land-locked Bangalore, India, has become a global knowledge industry hub through the virtual disencumbering of global trade via the Internet. However, it could be argued that if Africa is fundamentally inimical to human well-being, then for the running of an efficient global economy, Africans should be encouraged to pick up stakes and move elsewhere, where there biocapacity exceeds current the human ecological footprint. Russia, for example, had in 2006 a per capita biocapacity of 6.3 hectares compared to an ecological footprint of consumption of 4.4 hectares, leaving a surplus of 1.9 hectares per Russian (Global Footprint Network, "Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity, 2006", www.footprintnetwork.org). Furthermore, present UN predictions are for a doubling of Africa's population by 2050, but a 17% drop in the Russian Federation's population, from the present 140 m. to 116 m.

An interesting, 18-page review of African demographic trends by Bo Malmberg contends that while it's true that the decline in African fertility rates are two decades behind Asia and Latin America, Africa also has had the lowest reduction in infant mortality, and those two factors are closely correlated. In 1950, there were 180 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in both Asia and Africa, but in 2005, while Asia's rate fell to about 55, Africa's was 100.

Further, fertility rates across sub-Saharan Africa in 2005-2010 range from a low of three children per woman in southern Africa to around five in most of coastal West and East Africa. The highest rates, between six and seven, are in Sahelian West Africa (Mali, Niger, Chad) and central Africa (DR Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Uganda) - the physically remotest areas which have had the least contact with the outside world http://nai.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:241196 The Government of Ethiopia plans to reduce fertility from 5.4 to 4.0 by the year 2015, through such means as increasing the contraceptive prevalence rate from 15% (2005) to 44% in 2015 (Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED). 2006. "Ethiopia: Building on Progress A Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP)", p. 170, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTETHIOPIA/Resources/PASDEP_Final_English.pdf).

Malmberg also notes that child dependency rates (the fraction of 0-14 year-olds to the economically productive workforce, 15-64 year-olds) have always been highest in Africa since 1950, around 0.8, while in China, for example, it fell from 0.7 in 1975 to 0.3 in 2005, and India's fell from 0.7 in 1975 to 0.5 in 2005.

ETHIOPIAN AID RECEIPTS: One-half the African per capita level, 1960-2008 During the 1960s and 1970s, Ethiopians received only 27% of the average sub-Saharan level of official development assistance per capita from rich donor nations (World Development Indicators). In the 1980s and 1990s, this ratio improved to 53%, and in 2000-2008, it was 67%: $24 of net ODA per Ethiopian compared to $36.3 per sub-Saharan African (by 2008, Ethiopians received 84% of the average rate. In 2008-09, Ethiopia was the fourth-largest recipient of the Canadian government's development assistance ($176 mill. of which $31 m. as humanitarian assistance), with a focus on health and food security, second-largest recipient ($146 mill.) in 2007-08, and fifth in both 2006-07 and 2005-06 (CIDA. 2010. "Statistical Report on International Assistance - Fiscal Year 2008-2009", p. 9, 27; "Statistical Report on International Assistance - Fiscal Year 2008-2009", p. 6). There is no evidence that Canada is providing oral contraceptives to Ethiopia, however, as it has to other African countries. Canada exported on average $3.6m. annually in contraceptives (oral hormones, spermicides and condoms) to Africa between 2003 and 2008, the major recipients being Madagascar, Chad, Benin, Niger, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Mali (Industry Canada, Trade Data Online, HS Codes 293723, 293792, 300660, 401410).

The demographer John Caldwell, commenting on the UN's projections to the year 2300 wrote that "[i]t seems scarcely possible that sub-Saharan Africa could feed two billion people. It lacks the alluvial soils of the great riverine basins of Asia and volcanic soils are largely confined to parts of East Africa that are already densely settled (Rwanda's population density is over 800 persons per square mile, a comparable Asian density being that of Sri Lanka). Water resources are largely in the wrong places: the Congo River is nowhere near good irrigable soils; the much less voluminous Niger River does flow through good savannah grassland soils but its water available for irrigation is mostly already employed" (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2004. "The Implications of the United Nations Long-term Population Projections", in: "World Population to 2300", p. 112-122).

In 2001, the biographer and broadcaster Victoria Glendinning was one of half-dozen Britons sent by The Daily Telegraph for a fortnight into southern Sudan; she examined the work of humanitarian organisations. One evening in her Sudanese hut, in a reflective mood, she wrote: "I remembered the Rational Man [a Briton who had spent most of his working life in Africa, in industry] in Nairobi. What, he said, if aid is interfering in a system which doesn't work and shouldn't be kept going? Should people in inhospitable, backward and poverty-stricken areas of the earth be encouraged or condemned, to remain where they are, by small improvements in their standards of living? We could be trapping them in a situation where no one should be" ("Getting It Wrong, Getting It Right", in: "The Weekenders: Travels in the heart of Africa", Ebury Press, 2001: 321-322). Jeffrey Sachs in his technocratic zeal discounts such pessimism: "[t]he purpose of understanding geographical challenges is not to submit to fate but to identify practical steps to overcome barriers posed by specific natural endowments [...] In short, geographical impediments suggest priorities for public investment efforts, rather than reasons for surrender" (Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. "Common wealth: economics for a crowded planet", Penguin, p. 218). Sachs illustrates his point with the case of land-locked Bangalore, India, which has become a major hub of the global information technology industry.

Nevertheless it seems profoundly unjust that high-income countries hold one-sixth of humanity in regions that have per capita biocapacity that is nearly double the global mean, 3.3 hectares versus 1.8, while low income countries' citizens are alloted only one-half the average biocapacity, 1.0 hectares (Global Footprint Network. 2009. "Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity, 2006", Based on National Footprint Accounts 2009 edition: November 25, 2009). There are those who argue for the gradual dissolution of the arbitrary boundaries of "Westphalian states", the arbitrary circumstances of birth which quantitatively limit the attainment of full human potential; those European-controlled African states established by diplomats representing a dozen European countries at the 1884 Berlin Conference are particularly arbitrary as they divided from a distance complex ethnic topologies. Former World Bank economist Lant Pritchett: "The years from 1945 to 2005 stand out as perhaps the best sixty years for human material progress in history. The postwar founders created institutions to promote the increased mobility of goods. They created institutions to facilitate capital movements. But people were frozen" "Eventually, the citizens of the rich world must decide on what terms they will let the world’s poor people come" (Pritchett, Lant. 2006. "Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility", Center for Global Development, pp. 139, 142). Richard Dowden, a British journalist assessing his three decades' reporting from Africa: "The hypocrisy of promoting the free movement of money and goods but preventing the free movement of people is plain [...] [Globalization at present is] managed by the rich countries in their own interest" ("Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles", New York: Public Affairs, 2009, p. 537-538). Clearly, we need to work toward a supranational polity with the authority to mandate wealth transfers such that all humans have similar opportunities for social mobility: that children of an Afar pastoralist in Ethiopia will have access to the same health and educational benefits that a child of a Fortune 500 CEO receives, so that both children have equal chances of becoming a Nobel laureate, for example.

The economic historian Gregory Clark agrees: "History shows that, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, that the West has no model of economic development to offer the still-poor counties of the world. There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth, and even complicated economic surgery offers no clear prospect of relief for societies afflicted with poverty. Even direct gifts of aid have proved ineffective in stimulating growth. In this context the only policy the West could pursue that will ensure gains for at least some of the poor of the Third World is to liberalize immigration from these countries" (Clark, Gregory. "Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World", Princeton University Press, 2007: 371, 373). The real reason that Africa's population is growing faster than elsewhere is because they were the last to benefit from the availability of off-patent Western medicines, vaccines, and health services: "[E]xisting differences in capabilities between societies could now express themselves through income per person rather than population densities. The escape from the Malthusian era is one factor in the Great Divergence. The second is that modern medicine has substantially reduced the subsistence wage in such areas as tropical Africa, allowing populations to continue growing at incomes which are substantially below the average of the preindustrial world. Even at wages that were low by preindustrial standards life expectancy in some of the poorest countries in Africa is still above the average preindustrial level".

Gwynne Dyer has also stressed the importance of the United Nations in future world security: "For more than half a century, far-sighted people in many countries have been working on a program for international law and order that is our best and perhaps our only chance of avoiding global disaster on an unprecedented scale. It is obviously a hundred-year project at the very least, for it flies in the face of history and of traditional ideas about human nature [...] Either we get back to the building the international institutions we started working on sixty yeas ago, or we get used to the idea that we are working up to the Third World War" (Dyer, Gwynne. 2004. "Future: Tense. The Coming World Order", Random House, pp. 240, 246). Dyer also supports regional integration for Africa: "So Africans are still there - all of them, in their hundreds and hundreds of different ethnic groups. Good. Survival is better than subjugation or extinction. But it means that Africa has to build modern states of the most ethnically diverse populations of the world [...] Perhaps the answer is to submerge them all in a sea of other ethnic groups, none of them big enough to dream of dominating the rest" ("With Every Mistake", 2005, p. 232).

Dyer's latest book on the geopolitics of climate change, however, is more pessimistic: "Africa will be the continent that takes the biggest hit from climate change, and it is already home to more than half the wars in the world. The impacts of climate change will probably trigger many more wars, but the brutal truth is that most conflicts in Africa do not affect the rest of the world" ("Climate Wars", Random House, 2008, p. 59). Nevertheless, Dyer predicts that drought in Africa will trigger famines and waves of environmental refugees destined for Europe and South Africa (2008: 20).

But why were European families so much smaller than elsewhere, even before the Industrial Revolution? Harvard environmental scientist David B. McElroy proposes a geographical theory: when continental drift joined the North and South American continents at Panama several million years ago, it altered the pattern of ocean currents, leading to the "deep-water conveyor belt" which circulates warm surface water from Asia around Africa and up to northern Europe, giving the continent a mild climate and uniform precipiation throughout the year, while Asia and Africa had monsoon climates, alternating dry and rainy seasons. Human agricultural settlements in China, therefore, evolved under strong central control, the oldest continuous polity from the third century BCE, in fact, in order to redistribute food surpluses to areas of lower productivity, and avert famine. When humans settled into heavily forested northwestern Europe, however, the soils were heavy and difficult to cultivate, requiring not concerted human muscle power, but draught animals and technology: heavy ploughs to turn over the dense soils. European geography thus selected early on for capital-intensive, innovative societies, and smaller families where young men married later and inherited their parents' property rather than the hierarchical, labour-intensive society that was China; McElroy proposes that the surfeit of energy for agriculture drove Europe's mechanization trajectory, from waterwheel mills to steam engine and factory (McElroy, David B. 2010. "Energy: Problems, Perspectives and Prospects", Oxford U.P., p. 8).

SOME AFRO-OPTIMISM Some good things are happening in Africa and particularly Ethiopia that tend to get obscured. We should not discount the lessening of parents' grief that Western medicines and other changes in health services have brought to Africans: instead of one in every five children dying the number is now down to one in ten (185 deaths of sub-Saharan African children under five per 1,000 live births in 1980, 136 in 2010, according to the UN Population Division). Ethiopia's maternal mortality rate has nearly halved, from 1,061 per 100,000 live births in 1980, (2.5 times the world rate of 422) to 590 in 2008 (2.4 times the global rate, 251) (Hogan, M.C. et al. 2010. "Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980–2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5", The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 12 April 2010). True, longterm economic growth has been well below average, but in the past decade, it is near the top of nations. Between 1980 and 2006, Ethiopia's GDP per capita grew, in real terms, by an average annual rate of 0.8% (rank 136 out of 197 countries), compared to a world average of 1.7%, and much lower than Nigeria's 1.1% (126th), India's 4.1% (22nd) and China's 8.9% (4th). In 2000-2006, however, Ethiopia's per capita GDP according to the World Bank grew 4.4% annually, more than double the world average (1.9%) ("World Development Indicators"). In 2006-2009, initial IMF estimates are for annual growth of 7.6%, placing Ethiopia sixth-highest in the world, and second-highest in Africa after Angola (9.8%) and ahead of India (6.4%) (IMF. "World Economic Outlook", October 2009, Gross domestic product per capita, constant prices). This despite having the 34th-highest population growth rate over 2000-2008, 2.6%. In fact, half of the top ten fastest-growing populations in 2008 are not African: Qatar (rank #1), Singapore (2), Belize (6), Jordan (8), and Timor-Leste (9) (World Bank, "World Development Indicators"). And to reduce malaria mortality, Ethiopia has gone from just 2% of its children sleeping under insecticide-treated bed nets in 2000 to 38% in 2008 (UN. 2009. "The Millennium Development Goals Report", p. 34). Adult HIV prevalence in 2009 was between 1.4% and 2.8%, with 29% of persons needing ARTs receiving them in 2007 (www.unaids.org). Ethiopia, along with food-insecure Niger and Burkina Faso and four others are the only African countries to have allocated more than ten per cent of their national budgets to agriculture in 2008 (Thurow, Roger and Scott Kilman. 2009. "Enough. While the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty", Public Affairs, p. 268). Although Ethiopians have received only 47% of the average per capita development aid allotment for sub-Saharan Africa during 1961-2008, it has risen steeply in the past several years, attaining 84% of the average in 2008 ("World Development Indicators", Net ODA received per capita). While long-term data are unavailable, recent trends in the United Nations Human Development Index, a composite of longevity, education and income, also rank Ethiopia as the second-fastest improver after Niger, with an average annual increase of 3.9% between 2000 and 2007, and 19 of the 25 most rapidly-improving countries are in Africa (UNDP. "Human Development Report 2009", Table G, G: Human development index trends). Global gaps in holistic measures of human development do appear to be narrowing, and Ethiopia is at the head of the pack.

Then, the reality check. At 62.9%, sub-Saharan Africa's adult literacy rate - an outcome indicator of a country's educational system - is now similar to India's 64.2%, but Ethiopia is far back at 35.9% in 2004, up from 27.0% in 1994 (Human Development Index 2007/2008 and 2009; . The UN Economic Commission for Africa does not list Ethiopia as likely to achieve any of the eight Millennium Development Goals for poverty, education, and health ("MDGs in Africa: A Challenge for Change", http://uneca.org/mdgs/MDGs_page.asp). According to researchers at Addis Ababa University, "[t]here is a very complex web of multi-level factors balancing agro-economic and climatic vulnerabilities with socio-cultural and institutional change. A very high proportion (84%) of the population remains in rural areas with shrinking and eroding arable and grazing land per capita, less able to feed and [nurture] itself than the urban population" (Teller, Charles et al. 2009. "Population Dynamics, Food/Nutrition Security and Health in Ethiopia: Delicate Balance of Vulnerability & Resilience", IUSSP Marrakech, 30 September, 2009, Poster Session #3). While during 2000-08, foreign direct investment and emigrant workers' remittances contributed 2.9% and 1.8% of the sub-Saharan African GDP respectively, for Ethiopia they were only 1.8% and 1.0% respectively (World Development Indicators). And Ethiopia's 2008 Human Development Index, 0.414, is lower than India's in 1980 (0.427), although the gap is narrowing swiftly (UNDP, HDR 2009). The Population Reference Bureau notes that donor delays and retrenchment have limited Ethiopians' access to contraceptives; this, and men's disapproval of contraception practices are among the many obstacles for rapid acceleration of fertility decline. "Nationwide, 80 percent of family planning services are provided by the public sector, and more than 85 percent of contraceptive users rely on just two methods — injections and oral contraceptives. More than a third of Ethiopian women would like to space their next birth or stop having children altogether, but are not using a method of contraception. The main reasons women give for not using a method of contraception include lack of information about the methods, lack of access, and rumors about side effects" (Ringheim 2009: 3-4). To accelerate fertility decline, the World Bank is recommending that Ethiopia focus on strengthening women's reproductive rights in the rural areas, as opposed to broad-based investments in general social infrastructure (Luc Christiaensen et al. 2007. "Capturing the Demographic Bonus in Ethiopia: Gender, Development and Demographic Actions", Powerpoint presentation, Washington, DC: World Bank). Ethiopian contraceptive usage rates (% of women ages 15-49) were 2% in 1980 and 4% in 1990 (World Bank, World Development Indicators). The Bank recommends "improving availability of contraceptives even in the most remote rural areas" by increasing the contraceptive prevalence rate from 15% in 2004/2005 to 25% in 2009/10 and male and female condoms distribution from 80 m in 2006/07 to 140 m in 2009/10 (World Bank. 2008. "Capturing the Demographic Bonus in Ethiopia" 2006, cited in: "Country Assistance Strategy ... Ethiopia", 2008-2011, p. 30, 54, 70). Ethiopia's present contraceptive prevalence is about two-thirds the overall rate for sub-Saharan Africa in 2008, 22.8% (World Development Indicators).

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Later in 2010, the book "The Demographic Transition and Development in Africa: Applying the case study of Ethiopia in developing countries" (Springer) is scheduled for publication. The table of contents is listed at: http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/population+studies/book/978-90-481-8917-5