Ethiopia and Djibouti signed an agreement on Friday for the installation of 765 kilometres gas pipelines between the two countries. When completed in 2020, the pipeline will enable Ethiopia to sell its gas resource from Calub and Hilala fields in the Ogaden area of Somali Region via Djibouti Port.
Calub and Hilala fields have deposits of 4.7 trillion cubic feet of gas and 13.6 million barrels of associated liquids, both discovered in the 1970s but not yet exploited.
The agreement between Djibouti and Ethiopia comes more than a year after POLY-GCL signed a memorandum of understanding with Djibouti to invest $4 billion to build the natural gas pipeline, a liquefaction plant and an export terminal to be located in Damerjog, near the country’s border with Somalia.
Ethiopia and Djibouti are already connected via railway, electricity and water supply.
Ethiopia expects over one billion dollars annual income by selling gas to the global market.
Africa’s eastern seaboard could soon become a major global producer of liquefied natural gas, with other planned projects based on big gas finds made in Tanzania and Mozambique.
Ethiopia, Africa’s biggest coffee producer, is introducing production and marketing reforms that could triple its output in five years.
The country is replacing old trees and cutting existing ones to allow new stems to sprout as ageing trees become less productive.
That could help boost output to between 1.2 million tons and 1.8 million tons by 2024, up from an estimated 600,000 tons in the recent harvest, Bloomberg quoted the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority as saying.
Old trees account for about 60 percent of the 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of trees in production, while another 1.5 million hectares aren’t yet yielding beans, according to the authority.
New trees in the country, where smallholders account for almost all output, take about three to four years to start producing.
The government, non-governmental organizations and research centers are helping to implement the changes, Adugna Debela, director general of the authority, said Thursday in an interview in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
Marketing reforms are helping producers skip some stages of the supply chain, Adugna said. That will help increase income for farmers, who currently receive about 60 percent of the price of coffee, he said.
“Under the new reforms, farmers can directly export,” he said. “We are creating awareness and this will be materialized this production year.”
Ethiopia exports the bulk of its beans to Europe and the U.S., and is trying to tap new markets in Asia, especially China, South Korea and Japan, Bote said.
China has the potential to take half of Ethiopia’s shipments, he said.
The United States launched yesterday a new five-year 40 million US dollars Health Financing Improvement Program to invest in expanding Ethiopia’s capacity to provide quality affordable healthcare to citizens across the country.
Under the new program, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will work with the Ministry of Health to strengthen policy and financing reforms that will enable public and private entities to better provide primary health services while reducing out-of-pocket expenses for Ethiopians.
Over the next five years, the new program will focus on mobilizing increased domestic resources and streamlining medical insurance schemes to expand coverage to millions of people.
The project will also work with public and private healthcare providers to better utilize resources and revenues to finance their services.
USAID’s Health Financing Improvement Program builds upon the successes of earlier investments like USAID’s community-based health insurance initiative, which currently provides medical coverage to nearly 20 million Ethiopians nationwide.
USAID Mission Director Leslie Reed remarked, “We look forward to continuing our joint work to tackle the challenges facing health financing as part of overall efforts to build a truly sustainable and resilient health system in Ethiopia.
Together, we can show other developing countries around the world that with the right political will and commitment, it is possible to lay the promising foundation to a self-reliant healthcare system, capable of providing high-quality health services to all citizens in every corner of the country.”
U.S. development programs like the Health Financing Improvement program invest in the capacity of Ethiopian institutions and the Ethiopian people to address their own needs and become stronger partners.
The United States is the largest bilateral donor to Ethiopia’s health sector, with approximately 150 million US dollars per year in funding for HIV/AIDS; malaria; maternal, neonatal and child health; nutrition; tuberculosis; and water, sanitation and hygiene.
Overall, the United States has provided over $4 billion in development and humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia over the past five years.
Ethiopia and Luxembourg have agreed to strengthen cooperation on both bilateral and multilateral venues.
This agreement was made during a meeting between Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr Workneh Gebeyehu and the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Assselborn, yesterday.
Both parties highlighted the importance of enhancing bilateral relations and other multilateral issues including migration and refugee management.
“In such score, Minister Workneh took note of Ethiopia’s refugee law, which he described as one of the most progressive refugee policies in Africa and beyond. Dr Workneh also acknowledged Luxemburg’s support for the EU-Africa Strategic Partnership,
Minister Assselborn expressed his country’s keenness to further boost relations with Ethiopia.
On his four-day visit to Ethiopia, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi praised the country’s generosity towards hosting refugees, as well as the government’s openness to new and innovative approaches to improve the lives of the more than 900,000 refugees and the communities hosting them.
The High Commissioner spent two days in Melkadida, a region bordering Somalia, which hosts over 200,000 refugees.
He also visited markets supported by microfinance and other economic empowerment programmes, where refugees and the local community buy and sell their crops. The programme has been so successful that some of the crops are being exported to other regions in the country. Refugees told the High Commissioner that they are saving some of their income to improve the markets themselves.
“The host community are welcoming us, and we are welcoming them.”
“What has developed here is a unique approach to self-reliance of refugees where the government of Ethiopia has been extremely open to new approaches,” said Grandi. “The host communities and refugees have also been remarkably open to working together in harmony. This is something we don’t normally see.”
At a meeting with community leaders in Dollo Ado, the High Commissioner and IKEA Foundation CEO Per Heggenes heard about how the investment has had a positive impact on the entire community. They also announced that the Foundation has decided to extend their investment in the project for at least three more years to ensure the community can sustain it independently.
Heggenes, who noted that the area was in a dire situation when the project began, calls the progress he has witnessed “a dream come true.” He said its legacy is as much about helping foster harmony between the refugees and the local Ethiopians, as it is about growing the economy.
“What always happens when large numbers of refugees descend on a small community is it creates conflicts, because everyone wants to have the firewood, everyone wants to have the grazing land for their goats,” said Heggenes. “We approached this in a way to say we’re going to help the refugees and the host community come together, farm the land together, share the crops and live as sisters and brothers.”
At the Melkadida Camp, the High Commissioner visited another project that the IKEA Foundation invested in – a secondary school, where refugee and host community students have access to quality teachers, well-equipped classrooms and a supportive learning environment.
For those that graduate, there is an opportunity to attend a new teacher’s college in Melkadida, also thanks to IKEA Foundation funding, with the goal of giving young people the opportunity to become professionally qualified teachers and to help shape the next generation of students in the region.
One of those students, 19-year-old Fartun who is in her last year of secondary school and hopes to attend university to study medicine, told the High Commissioner and Heggeness that she hopes the rest of Ethiopia can learn from how education can be a crucial tool to bring peace and harmony between communities.
“I have refugee friends and friends from the host community,“ she says. “ We study together and it makes no difference. The host community are welcoming us, and we are welcoming them.”
“It is important that we share this solidarity.”
“I have been in the most remote villages of this continent where sharing the little food, water and shelter that people have with foreigners that are in distress because they had to flee, is not like in other richer parts of the world. It’s not the subject of political negotiations but is a natural instinct rooted in the absolute values of a tradition of a culture and of a society,” Grandi said in an interview.
“This solidarity is there. People have it naturally. But we should not take it for granted. It is important that we share this solidarity.”
Throughout his visit, the High Commissioner spoke about the importance of the Global Compact on Refugees, adopted by the UN General Assembly last December, which calls for more inclusion of refugees in communities where they reside and more global support for countries like Ethiopia, who continue to welcome and host them.
“This the first year we’re going to implement the Global Compact on Refugees,“ Grandi said. “But I tell people we’re already implementing it here in Melkadida, with multiple partners and development partners from programmes in irrigation, vocation, educational training.”
While in Addis, the High Commissioner also met with President Sahle-Work Zewde, as well as Ato Kebede, the Director General of the government’s refugee agency ARRA, where he praised Ethiopia’s new refugee law as forward-looking and representing the principles of the Global Compact on Refugees.
Addressing the media following his meeting with the President, Grandi said “the proclamation is one of the best refugee laws, not only in Africa, but in the world,” and pledged to mobilize more resources for development, “not just for refugees, but also for their hosts.”
The road connecting Ethiopia and Kenya has raised trade by 400 percent between the countries, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).
In an exclusive interview with ENA, AfDB President Akinwumi A. Adesina said the bank is financing transport and energy infrastructures and building new agro-industrial parks to promote Ethiopia’s economy.
AfDB is delighted to have funded the road that links Ethiopia all the way to Mombasa, Kenya, he added.
“That road alone has allowed trade between Ethiopia and Kenya to rise by 400 percent, and has also provided Ethiopia with access to the port,” Adesina pointed out.
According to him, the bank is also financing Ethiopia’s hydropower generation, power transmission lines, and infrastructure linking Hawassa Industrial Park to Djibouti as well as the new agro-industrial parks to promote value addition.
The government of Ethiopia has been doing very well in investing in hydroelectric power, the president said, describing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as “a major accomplishment.”
Adesina expressed his amazement by saying, “I have never seen any other African country invest more in infrastructure than this country.”
“This is the country that has experienced economic growth rate over 10 percent for over a decade and even last year (it) had 7.7 percent GDP growth rate which is amusing against the context of the global growth rate of about 3 percent. This is a phenomenal performance that you have in Ethiopia,” the president stated.
“I will tell you one thing that never makes me nervous about Ethiopia. If you ever watch Olympics and you see people that run long distances without getting tired, they are Ethiopians; right? So I think Ethiopians always know how to face challenges, and I am sure that is one you will cope with as well.”
Obviously, given the history of Ethiopia, where the public sector does a lot of things, the president stated that “with the bold move of opening up the economy for the private sector, the economy will even grow faster with liberalization.”
Describing the private sector as a key potential to economic growth, Adesina noted that it is critical to unlocking the potential through creating a good environment as well as right business and investment regulatory bodies.
Furthermore, he pointed out that AfDB will invest in transforming Ethiopia’s rural economy into zones of economic prosperity.
“All in all, we are great partners with Ethiopia, but most importantly Ethiopians by themselves are doing great all by themselves. We can only help to support what they are doing,” President Adesina concluded.
This biweekly bulletin is prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia in view of informing the public and the diplomatic community on investment, trade, technology transfer and tourism activities undertaken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the opportunities in those sectors.
This edition includes articles (on pages 4-5) about Ethiopia’s presence at the annual tourism expo of Luxembourg, known as LUXEXPO, and the colourful promotion of tourism in Ethiopia at the Brussels holiday fair “Salon des Vacances” from 7-10 February 2019.
The Ethiopian parliament passed on 4 February what is considered the strongest tobacco control legislation in Africa that will reduce tobacco use in the country.
The Food and Medicine Administration Proclamation, passed unanimously by the parliament, will save lives and protect over 105 million people in Africa’s second most populous nation, experts say.
The new law requires 100 per cent smoke-free public and workplaces, bans tobacco advertising and promotions, restricts the sale of flavoured tobacco products and mandates pictorial warning labels covering 70 per cent of the front and back of all tobacco products.
The law also bans the sale of heated tobacco products, e-cigarettes, and shisha, and prohibits tobacco sales to anyone under the age of 21.
Bintou Camara, Director of Africa Programs, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids explains the impact of Ethiopia’s new law.
“As tobacco companies continue to set their sights on Africa, Ethiopia has set an example for what all African nations can and should to do curb tobacco use, the world’s leading cause of preventable death,” Ms Camara said.
Every year, more than 16,800 Ethiopians are killed by tobacco-caused disease, according to the Tobacco Atlas. Still, more than 18,000 children (10-14 years old) and over two million adults (15 years and above) continue to use tobacco each day.
Ms Camara said tobacco companies fight hardest against the measures they know work to reduce tobacco use in Africa and around the world,
“The Ethiopian government must now move to implement the law as swiftly as possible and remain vigilant against attempts by tobacco companies to undermine this tremendous progress.”
Tobacco use kills more than seven million people every year around the world, according to the World Health Organisation.
More than six million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while about 890,000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
Nearly 80 per cent of the world’s more than one billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries, including in Africa.
A legal tussle over who owns teff, Ethiopia’s staple grain, has been settled.
Until just recently, an obscure Dutch agronomist held the patent for making pretty much anything out of teff flour, strangling Ethiopia’s ability to market and sell its millenia-old grain. The tale of how that happened — and how Ethiopia won back control of its staple crop — is an object lesson in how the worldwide practice of patenting agricultural products often harms those in the developing world.
A three-judge court in the Netherlands ruled a European patent for the products made of teff lacked “inventiveness,” ending a years-long controversy over who owned the ancient grain. The controversial patent, which was initially filed in 2003, listed Dutchman Jans Roosjen as the inventor of the teff flour that’s used to make injera flatbread and other traditional Ethiopian food. The Ethiopian embassy in the Netherlands confirmed the ruling, which was first filed in June 2014 and whose verdict was delivered in November last year.
“The reason for the late announcement is the time for appeal was still running,” the embassy wrote on its Twitter handle. “As no appeal was made, the verdict is now final: the claim to processing teff by patent holder is null and void in the Netherlands.”
Rich in protein, fibre, and minerals, teff has slowly been gaining a global foothold especially after the Ethiopian government lifted the ban on exports in 2015. It has also been marked as the next big superfood, as huge numbers of people in the West have moved away from low-fat and sugar-free diets and gravitated towards gluten-free.
Looking at it as a lucrative industry as such, teff products have been introduced in countries including Spain and the United States. Yet its patent by a Dutchman left many Ethiopians, who have cultivated and used it for millennia, confounded.
“It is an issue of our inability to own our national assets in the international legal system,” Fitsum Arega, the former commissioner of the Ethiopian Investment Commission, has said on Twitter of the patent. “We need to defend it.”
The furor over the teff ownership comes at a time when Africans are increasingly raising questions about creative and artistic theft, cultural appropriation, and pushing to reclaim their narrative.
While Ethiopia can once again market its teff in the Netherlands, Roosjen’s patents remain in force in Belgium, Germany, Britain, Austria and Italy. The Ethiopian attorney general’s office has since issued a statement that the ruling was critical to its own efforts to one day restore its “full ownership of teff.”
The Ethiopian government is celebrating a major victory in a long-running dispute over who owns the patent for products made from teff – an ancient grain that forms the basis of Ethiopia’s staple food, injera.
In 2003, a Dutch company registered a European patent for teff-related products, claiming that these were “invented” by a certain Jans Roosjen, a senior company official. In recent years, Ethiopia has complained that this is totally inaccurate — Ethiopians have been using teff for millennia, after all — and that the patent prevents Ethiopian companies from exploiting a growing global market for teff.
Teff is gluten-free and rich in nutrients and has been touted as the next major health food fad, following in the footsteps of quinoa and kale.
This November, a Dutch court ruled that the patent contained no ‘inventiveness’, and was therefore null and void. The news was announced by Fitsum Arega, until recently the chief of staff of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, on Twitter on Wednesday.
“I just learned that The Court of The Hague ruled against the Teff patent holder. This is great news,” he said. “I hope we can learn from this that our national assets must be protected by Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia.”
The embassy of the Netherlands in Ethiopia confirmed the news. “This embassy confirms the November ruling. The reason for the late announcement is the time for appeal was still running. As no appeal was made, the verdict is now final: the claim to processing teff by patent holder is null and void in the Netherlands,” it said.
This would not be the first time that a western company has tried to patent or copyright an existing African product. One example: several French and American companies have tried to trademark ‘rooibos’, the herbal tea that has been grown in South Africa for generations. To prevent this from happening again, South Africa’s department of trade and industry successfully obtained ‘geographic indicator status’ for the product, meaning that only manufacturers in South Africa may use the name.
