Columbia Scholar Under Fire for Award to Ethiopian Premier

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A Columbia University scholar, Jeffrey Sachs, is coming under fire from Ethiopian-Americans who are upset that the author of “The End of Poverty” is presenting a $200,000 award to Ethiopia’s embattled prime minister.


Mr. Sachs, who has risen to celebrity status as director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and director of the United Nations’ Millennium Project, is scheduled to be in Oslo, Norway, tomorrow to present the Ethiopian leader, Meles Zenawi, with the first-ever African Green Revolution Yara Prize. The benefactor of the award is a Norwegian fertilizer company, Yara International, whose foundation picked Mr. Zenawi in July.


Ethiopian-Americans have posted several articles on the Internet denouncing the fertilizer company for bestowing an award on the prime minister, a man they said has done little to uplift a country that ranks among the world’s poorest and that is veering toward dictatorship. They are strongly urging Mr. Sachs to distance himself from the award.


As of yesterday, Mr. Sachs planned to participate in the weekend ceremony, Columbia officials said. Mr. Sachs was unavailable for comment.


The choice of Mr. Zenawi is “not just scandalous but a callous insult to the sense of dignity even in poverty of the Ethiopian people,” a UCLA scholar, Negussay Ayele, wrote in an August 25 essay published on the Web site mediaethiopia.com.


The director of Tropical Agriculture at Columbia’s Earth Institute, Pedro Sanchez, is one of Yara Foundation’s five board members. Members of the board were responsible for choosing the winner of the prize.


In his article, Mr. Ayele, who is a former Ethiopian diplomat, suggested that Yara, one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, gave its award to the prime minister because state-controlled Ethiopian agencies buy fertilizer products from the company. “In 2000, the Meles regime decided to sideline other, longtime suppliers, in favor of Yara, agreeing to pay it more than the going market price per metric ton,” he wrote.


A spokeswoman for Yara, Ingegerd Rafn, said the company’s business in Ethiopia has “nothing to do with the prize.” She said: “Yara is disappointed that our good intentions are being misunderstood.” In a statement announcing the selection of Mr. Zenawi, the Yara Foundation credited the prime minister with taking “decisive steps towards increasing food production and reducing poverty in one of the poorest countries of the developing world.”


“He has brought about political change in Ethiopia, and placing the rural poor first in the country’s development strategies,” the foundation said.


Ethiopians in America, such as Mr. Ayele, said the country is mired in desperate poverty. “The vast majority of Ethiopians know that their country is still chafing under debilitating impoverishment, hunger, disease, angst, intimidation, and insecurity,” he wrote.


A development index designed by the United Nations Development Program ranks Ethiopia 170 out of 177 countries. The country has “one of the world’s highest incidences of malnutrition and one of the lowest primary-education enrolment ratios. HIV/AIDS is an issue of increasing concern,” a report on the Web site of the UN’s World Food Program said. The Economist reported last month that 9 million people in Ethiopia depend on food aid and 18 million of its population of 75 million are malnourished. Mr. Sachs has called on America to dedicate a fixed amount of its GNP to foreign aid that would go to poor countries.


Mr. Zenawi has ruled Ethiopia since 1991, when his alliance party, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, overthrew Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.


Opposition parties accused Mr. Zenawi’s government of rigging ballots in May’s general election. On June 8, police fired on a group of protesters backing opposition parties and killed about 40 people. Mr. Zenawi has said he would investigate the deaths.


In a passage in his best-selling book, “The End of Poverty,” in which Mr. Sachs offers a lengthy list of policy prescriptions for creating global prosperity, the Columbia scholar describes a speech given by the prime minister in 2003.


“The prime minister made a powerful and insightful presentation about Ethiopia’s potential to expand food production, and thereby to overcome pervasive hunger,” he wrote.


An Ethiopian-American who edits the Web site ethiomedia.com, Abraha Belai, said Mr. Sachs underestimates the extent to which the government of Ethiopia is to blame for the country’s problems. “Sachs has no clue about the political conflicts under the surface,” Mr. Belai told The New York Sun. “He simply sees mind-boggling poverty and tries to do something. But there’s a government that is making a fortune out of the famine business.”


A spokesman at Ethiopia’s embassy in Washington, D.C., did not return calls for comment. Freedom House, a group that monitors human rights and publishes a survey of freedom in the world, labeled Ethiopia “partly free” in its 2005 report. But the report said, “Ethiopians cannot change their government democratically.”


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