Stephen, I read your piece above, but it is so full of faulty assumptions, I will have to take them step by step.
First, your assumption that Ethiopia's population will grow to 160 million in 30 years, and the cannot stuff most of those people into cities. One cannot assume that population growth will (or even can) continue at present rates. The result would be mass starvation and/or conflict over resources. Either of these scenarios would truncate population growth.
If you cannot stuff all those people into cities, likewise you cannot stuff them onto the land, it does not and cannot support so many. Especially in northern Ethiopia the land is already beyond its carrying capacity. The extra people would have to go somewhere.
And, as people move to cities, family size usually falls, usually to something close to replacement rate (~2.2 children per family.) So urban migration leads to population stabilisation.
Another false assumption is 'expulsion' or 'forcible clearing' of people from land. Nobody is talking about using force. If you have worked with smallholder farm families, you know many of their members leave voluntarily, or out of economic necessity, to work on larger farms, off-farm enterprises, or in distant cities and countries. This process has been going on for decades now. Small farming simply can no longer support families by itself, and families are switching their income streams to other activities.
Thirdly, Nigeria is not exceptional for being 50% urbanised. Senegal is also, with other countries following suit. It is NOT due to oil wealth, since the oil-based activities are concentrated in the Delta. Rather, it is Nigeria's diversified economy that attracts people to cities, as well as rural crowding that squeezes them out of the countryside.
This is the main point you should absorb - a healthy African economy is like a healthy economy anywhere - diversified, with strong service and manufacturing sectors and a diminished reliance on small-scale dirt farming.
Also, Inida does not have '40 years of urban development.' Its economic modernisation is much more recent, and its rural-to-urban migration is proceeding apace, with population growth leveling just beginning.
The entire point is that development resources really ought to be going into supporting African countries' efforts to modernise their economies, rather than clinging to small-scale farming which is a sentence to eternal poverty. That means helping develop off-farm employment, industry, services, infrastructure, etc., and at the same time, modern farms that are large enough to provide a decent living standard to farmers AND produce more food for the rest of the population.
I understand that the aid industry contains a certain entrenched constituency that feels wedded to small-scale farming, but I'm concerned that this old guard is holding back real development of the sort that the people are undertaking on their own anyway.
Stephen, I read your piece above, but it is so full of faulty assumptions, I will have to take them step by step.
First, your assumption that Ethiopia's population will grow to 160 million in 30 years, and the cannot stuff most of those people into cities. One cannot assume that population growth will (or even can) continue at present rates. The result would be mass starvation and/or conflict over resources. Either of these scenarios would truncate population growth.
If you cannot stuff all those people into cities, likewise you cannot stuff them onto the land, it does not and cannot support so many. Especially in northern Ethiopia the land is already beyond its carrying capacity. The extra people would have to go somewhere.
And, as people move to cities, family size usually falls, usually to something close to replacement rate (~2.2 children per family.) So urban migration leads to population stabilisation.
Another false assumption is 'expulsion' or 'forcible clearing' of people from land. Nobody is talking about using force. If you have worked with smallholder farm families, you know many of their members leave voluntarily, or out of economic necessity, to work on larger farms, off-farm enterprises, or in distant cities and countries. This process has been going on for decades now. Small farming simply can no longer support families by itself, and families are switching their income streams to other activities.
Thirdly, Nigeria is not exceptional for being 50% urbanised. Senegal is also, with other countries following suit. It is NOT due to oil wealth, since the oil-based activities are concentrated in the Delta. Rather, it is Nigeria's diversified economy that attracts people to cities, as well as rural crowding that squeezes them out of the countryside.
This is the main point you should absorb - a healthy African economy is like a healthy economy anywhere - diversified, with strong service and manufacturing sectors and a diminished reliance on small-scale dirt farming.
Also, Inida does not have '40 years of urban development.' Its economic modernisation is much more recent, and its rural-to-urban migration is proceeding apace, with population growth leveling just beginning.
The entire point is that development resources really ought to be going into supporting African countries' efforts to modernise their economies, rather than clinging to small-scale farming which is a sentence to eternal poverty. That means helping develop off-farm employment, industry, services, infrastructure, etc., and at the same time, modern farms that are large enough to provide a decent living standard to farmers AND produce more food for the rest of the population.
I understand that the aid industry contains a certain entrenched constituency that feels wedded to small-scale farming, but I'm concerned that this old guard is holding back real development of the sort that the people are undertaking on their own anyway.