War, Wealth And The Weather

I see that the Ethiopian army is pressing forward into Eritrea, hoping to build on the advantage it gained after its surprise attack earlier in the week. This followed on the breakdown of talks aimed at settling a border dispute.

Of course, the two countries have a long history of hatred and war Eritrea was part of Ethiopia for a long time and suffered dreadful repression during the years when Ethiopia was ruled by a Marxist military regime. Subsequently, its forces defeated the Ethiopian army and declared independence, thereby depriving the Ethiopians of access to the sea. The latter have never accepted defeat and will do all they can to incorporate the territory once more.
Now, war is bad enough, and the kind of militarism and imperialism displayed by the Ethiopians is particularly unpleasant. But all this is happening at a time when the entire area is beset by famine and, after a long period of drought, floods. The pictures are printed daily the same ones we saw a decade or so ago, during the last Ethiopian famine.
But isn't there something incredibly obscene in this? Shouldn't the emphasis be on saving those who are starving? And why is it not? Is it that the country's rulers don't care? Or is it that they no longer see it as their business? Do they look on famine as a problem that will be solved by the aid agencies and the rich west? And have we, for all the best reasons, helped them towards this view?
These are complex questions, and I don't pretend to have the answers. But I suspect that something has gone very wrong in the aid equation. I think the Ethiopian government, such as it is, now factors western aid into its calculations. It assumes we'll be there. So it doesn't see itself as having a long-term strategic role. If this is so, it's a catastrophe, because it means the country is now aid-dependent.
We, the givers, have to be very careful here. I applaud the idea of helping rural communities become self-sufficient. But I despise the idea of creating an aid empire. There is little point in helping a farmer to plant rice or millet if the country's army is going to sequester crops, or if it is going to get embroiled in an all-out war that beggars everybody. The militarism has to be confronted.
Equally, there is no point in developing 'sustainable farming' if the country lurches from drought to flood, with famine between both. The process, the campaign, must be waged at a higher level of understanding, and hard decisions may have to be made.
Clearly, if Ethiopians and Bangla Deshis and Indians and Chinese and probably 95% of the earth's population are to have any chance of developing sustainable agriculture and living free of the threat of climatic disaster, then we have to engage with global climate change.
I know that many aid activists will recoil from this, but there's no escaping it. Ethiopia is not currently viable on any kind of long-term basis. Flood and drought and famine will return again and again. Any further aid has got to concentrate on helping them to deal with this inevitability, as well as tackle the issue of greenhouse gases.
We have to understand that we are all in this together. The Ethiopians' fate is bound up with our own. But we also have to challenge the military logic that says that a time of famine is a good time to strike your enemy, who is also famine-stricken. Equally, we have to raise the issue of the world's increasingly precarious climate.
This returns me to immigration. Throughout history, humanity has ebbed and flowed across the face of the earth. The earth itself has changed sometimes icy, sometimes temperate, sometimes water-covered, other times not. The bits of land we inhabit, the homes we occupy, the comfort we enjoy, or not, these are all contingent, ephemeral things.
In the peat of the Ciide Fields in Mayo, there is a thin layer of volcanic ash from an eruption on Iceland 4000 years ago. There is marvellous evidence of a thriving cattle-rearing community. But the changes that occurred are clearly documented. Once there were trees there, then there weren't. Once there was a large and wealthy community, then it disappeared.
That's the way it is. We are among the most fortunate people on earth. Rich and well-fed, with loads of time to engage in leisure and enough resources to get drunk and fat. But another explosion on Iceland, or in the eastern Mediterranean, or Yellowstone Park could change that, as could accelerated climatic change.
In time, we Irish, plump and vexatious and intolerant as we are, could again be refugees ourselves. And what then? Will we remember the unkindness we showed to those who, like all humanity before them, ebbed and flowed across the face of the earth?
Nothing on this earth is fixed. You can depend on nothing. Who knows? We might yet be wanderers again. We should remember and foresee. That means giving as we have received and welcoming as we would wish to be welcomed ourselves, if things went wrong, again as they have in Ethiopia.
The Hog