Incentives matter: famine file

Not for the first time famine stalks Ethiopia:

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world's pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country's worst food crisis for decades.

An obvious question is Why does this keep happening? One factor is incentives. Tim Worstall writes,

[...] all land is State owned. There is no incentive for a farmer to invest in improving the productivity of his land for it simply ain't his land. In more detail, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister:

Now we have, as I am sure all of you know, rejected the concept of changing land into a commodity in Ethiopia. We feel that this choice in our context is not economically rational. That is why we don’t accept it. Why do we think it is not economically rational? By fully privatizing land ownership, one starts the process of differentiation. The creative, vigorous peasant farmer gets to own larger pieces of land and the less effective get to be left to live in doubt.

He then goes on to reject this and insist that as they have lots of peasants thus they should have lots of peasant farms. Oh, and, while the land is held by the peasant "in perpetuity" the government still reserves the right to reallocate at any time. So it's not actually in perpetuity and of course as it cannot be owned privately it cannot be used as security for a loan to improve its productivity.

Until those incentives are sorted out Ethiopia is condemned to have repetetive famines, sadly.