Ethiopia defies overpopulation due to aid.

Joey Sawyer April 30th 7 pm

In my lifetime, I have always heard of starving children in Ethiopia and Somalia. In the past couple of years these two countries have been hit the hardest by the droughts that have swept through the "horn" of Africa, which is essentially subsaharan Africa.
In Ethiopia, there is little regulation of the aid they are recieving and thus they have become out of control. Here is the situation: They recieve tons of aid food which feeds there extremely poor population and keeps them alive. These people then go on to have children that they cannot support, and then more aid is required to keep more people alive. The population is increasing exponentially while the food production of the country is steadily declining. The natural order of things would have a lot of these people die out until the food they can grow would sustain them, but that sounds evil and is unpopular in the public eye. It is our responsibility to take care of these people who cannot take care of themselves and are not being help in a fashion that sets them up to sustain themselves in the future. The fact is we could help them develop agriculture, and it still probably would not support everyone there, so some aid may be necessary. These people now rely on food aid to survive and their addiction grows daily as does their population.
Another problem presented by the food aid they are recieving is that when the aid arrives any food local farmers may have produced to sell is worthless, thus ruining the buds of a new economy. There may be no way to reduce their aid without causing mass deaths or violence on a large scale, but the fact remains that the land these people are on cannot support them and they would not be there in the first place if we had not been feeding them all this time. I see two choices, move them all to kansas, or teach them to farm better and see how much they can sustain themselves. So before we continue on this hopeless path, we must ask ourselves are we really helping? We seem to have gotten them into this mess (at least to the increased extent of it), but can we do anything to get them out of it? If we can, it certainly isn't in the short run with free bags of food.