But - but - the market solves everything!

Dr. Tewolde Egziabher, of Ethiopia's Environmental Protection Authority and a noted champion of biodiversity, says Ethiopia could become self-sufficient in food production but that the policies of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US Agency for International Development are preventing it, driving the nation toward another devastating famine like that of the 1980s.

The problem, Dr. Egziabher says, is that even though last year less than a quarter of the people of Ethiopia depended on foreign food aid and this year's harvest is likely to be 60% greater than last year's,

"the Bank, the IMF and USAID are stopping us borrowing the money to build the stores, the roads and the other infrastructure we need to conserve what's left over.

"I have no doubt Ethiopia could grow enough to feed itself: many years it produces a surplus, and the farmers don't know what to do with all the grain.

"The problem is that many people don't have the cash to buy it, and the country hasn't the means to store it. ...

"The North's preoccupation with the supposed potential of the private sector risks preventing us moving towards self-sufficiency, and could possibly create the conditions for another famine,"

an outcome he blames on "dogma."

That's a polite way to put it. Tens of thousands of people, if not many more, at increasing risk of starvation in a land that could become agriculturally self-sufficient, all because of a narrow-minded, ideologically-driven hatred of the public sector and an obsessive fixation on private profit as the solution to every problem. Dogma? Sounds more like fetishism.