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For the past thirty years-under both Emperor Haile Selassie and President Mengistu Haile Mariam-Ethiopia suffered continuous war and intermittent famine until every single province has been affected by war to some degree. Evil Days, documents the wide range of violations of basic human rights committed by all sides in the conflict, especially the Mengistu government's direct responsibility for the deaths of at least half a million Ethiopian civilians.
What do peasants do in the face of severe food crisis and ecological stress, and how do they manage to survive on their own? This study revolves around a case study conducted by the author in the awraja (district) in the Ambassel Wollo province in northeastern Ethiopia. This is in the region that was hit hardest by the 1984-85 famine, which Rahmato calls "the worst tragedy rural Ethiopia had ever experienced". The author also critically examines other literature on famine response. The focus of this study is on what happens before famine comes, and how the peasants prepare for it. From a wealth of evidence, the author concludes that the seeds of famine are sown during the years of recovery.
For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers. This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles o...
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In From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia, James McCann engages an interdisciplinary perspective to uncover the historical background to the persistence of famine in the northeast region of Ethiopia. His study focuses on the northern Wallo region, an area that was incorporated into Haile Selassie's modern state system and now one of the most devastated portions of the country. The history of northern Wallo and its position within the modern Ethiopian state is presented through an examination of the circumstances in which its rural population lived, farmed, and adapted to a changing physical environment and political economy between 1900 and 1935. This period also coincided with the mos...