Análisis situacional

As far back as 1848, John Stuart Mill had addressed various concerns including environmental degradation. He underlined that there cannot be human satisfaction if every land is brought under cultivation and if plants are rooted out “as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.” Mill warned that the earth will lose a “great portion of its pleasantness” due to population growth and the pursuits towards increasing wealth “for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a large, but not a better or happier population” and expressed his hope that human beings should be “content

to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it”.69 Mill seems to have used the term

‘stationary’ figuratively as a sharp criticism against environmentally unsustainable patterns of ‘growth’ and unsustainable consumption.

The direction of progress which low-income economies aspire to pursue involves a steady march towards the stage where advanced economies are today. There was optimism and enthusiasm in the 1950s and 1960s to follow the path of capital accumulation, industrialization and economic growth. This was, however, followed by “re-examination of the process of

economic and social development”70 (since the 1970s) owing to the acute problems encountered

in these low-income countries, including Ethiopia in relation with the widening gap between rich and poor countries, the rising proportion of their population in poverty, the pace of rural-urban migration unmatched by the rate of economic development, pressures in balance of payments and increasing level of foreign indebtedness.71 These problems have been altering their form, intensity and magnitude over the last decades, and have now reached a stage which seems to threaten the very foundation on which their fragile subsistence economies depend on: i.e. their natural resources.

As Haynes observes, currently, there are serious challenges of environmental and economic sustainability in most developing countries on three fronts. First, climate change72 (to which low-income economies have minimal contribution) threatens “medium and long-term viability of

current development strategies and policies”.73 Second, globalization seems to have put “further

pressure on the natural environment as developing countries seek to catch up with their developed counterparts via ‘growth first’ and industrialization and development strategies”.74 This does not only involve the environmental degradation in the course of pursuits of developing

Chapter 2. “Wellbeing” as an Objective of Ethiopia’s Investment Promotion 53 countries to catch up, but the extensive economic exploitation of their economies by MNEs. And third, “the issues of desertification and deforestation and skewed land use patterns are clearly linked” 75 in the progression of environmental degradation.

Over eighty percent of Ethiopia’s population lives in rural areas and its livelihood mainly depends on subsistence farming which is adversely affected by change in temperature and rainfall patterns due to climate change. This not only disrupts the pattern and length of various seasons but also causes the extremes of precipitation, floods and famine. As Ethiopia’s current development pursuits envisage agriculture as one of the major factors in the take-off towards industrialization, the impact of climate change is apparent.

The second factor stated by Haynes with regard to the impact of globalization is also relevant because it has (as discussed in various sections) the positive impact of technology transfer and opening up markets while at the same time making it difficult for local producers to globally compete in the supply side of economic activities in Ethiopia. On the contrary, cultural globalization (which is steadily nurturing consumerism) accelerates the demand side of imported goods and services. The third factor identified by Haynes (deforestation, desertification and land use patterns) may not, however, be regarded as an independent factor but as a phenomenon which is inseparable from the first factor of climate change in the context of a dialectical cause and effect reciprocity. It is also inseparable from the second factor as long as the extractive and exploitative footprint of ‘globalization’ (in its current form) merely enhances the financial gains of MNCs and beefs up the wealth of the national elite, at the cost of worsening the livelihood of the rural poor.

Hunter et al state that human activity “including industrial economy, is a sub-system of the global ecological system” and its ability “to grow is limited by the physical limits of the ecosystem.” They further state that “[a]s human population and economic activity continue to

expand, we are increasingly pushing up against the limits of what the biosphere can support”.76

In the process of economic activities, “resources will be consumed and wastes generated”77 and

there is now a growing awareness that the magnitude of pressure on the environment is mainly attributable to factors such as the role of technology, pattern of consumption and population size.

In 1971, Paul Ehrlich, Ann Ehrlich and J. Holdren developed a formula that includes factors which determine the impact of human activities on the environment. And recently, Paul and

54 The Investment Promotion and Environment Protection Balance in Ethiopia’s Floriculture Anne Ehrlich wrote: “[t]he overall impact [on the environment] is equal to the product of

Population size times per capita Affluence times the Technologies and socio-economic-political

systems used to generate the affluence”.78 (I = PAT). However, there is the need for caution because none of these three factors (i.e. technology, consumption and population) is intrinsically harmful to the environment.

Although the formula cannot be uncritically accepted, it gives some picture regarding the adverse pressure exerted on the environment by eco-unfriendly application of technology (and socio-political systems), overindulgent consumerism and population growth (unmatched by socio-economic development). The formula, should not, for example, be interpreted against environmentally sound technological progress, because the letter “T” does not denote increase in technical progress as such, but solely represents the extent to which a given technology and a set of socio-economic-political policies (including the legal regime) have negative or positive impact on the environment.

In the Ethiopian context, the major challenge to environmental sustainability is the rate of population growth without corresponding growth in the supply side of goods and services commensurate with the rise in population. This does not undermine the relevance of technology to the Ethiopian context, because as the case study of this thesis indicates, technology can be a crucial factor that can cause environmental harm (depending on the level of compliance standards) or on the contrary facilitate the benefits that can be obtained from sustainable floriculture as highlighted under chapters 7 and 8.