What's New

Resilience must mean more than simply bouncing back from negative shocks: that is the message from last week's 2020 Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The conference, themed "Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security," provided a new definition of resilience, one that focuses on empowering individuals, households, and communities to become better off than they were before the shocks occurred.

Eight years ago, the Government of Ethiopia placed an export ban on maize and other major cereal crops. At the time, Ethiopia’s grain prices were three times higher than those on international markets. The government saw the price hikes as a symptom of trade and not high inflation rates, among other factors. But in 2013, higher-than-average Kiremt rains spurred projections of a bumper maize crop, which triggered the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to consider advising the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) to lift the export ban for the 2014 marketing season.

Fertile soil is one of the basic building blocks of agricultural productivity. In order for crops to grow properly, soils need to contain the proper nutrients; unfortunately in many areas of the world, soils have become depleted of their nutrients, leading to decreased productivity.

FEWS Net has issued an alert for East Africa, stating that a delayed start to the annual June-September rains is threatening harvests throughout the region. While rainfall has improved in recent weeks, FEWS estimates that normal rainfall would need to not only continue for the remainder of the season but extend past the normal rainy season in order for crops to fully recover. In large areas of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, total rainfall has been 20-50 percent lower than average.

Nearly 30 years after the 1984 famine that left more than 400,000 people dead, Ethiopia has made significant progress toward food security. Some of these recent successes include a reduction in poverty, an increase in crop yields and availability, and an increase in per capita income—rising in some rural areas by more than 50 percent!

What happened to cause this breakthrough, and what steps does the country need to stay on track?