On Growth Two

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27. Aklilu Lemma

Professor Aklilu Lemma was born September 18, 1932, in Jijiga, Ethiopia. He studied biology at the University College in Addis Ababa and went to the United States where he continued his studies at Northwestern University. He was graduated in zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1964 he obtained his doctorate at the School of Hygiene and Public Health of Johns Hopkins University and that year he joined the Medical Faculty of the Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa and lectured on parasitology. From 1966 to 1970 he was dean of the Faculty of Science and Director of the Institute of Pathobiology at the same university. Professor Lemma was a visiting scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, lectured the Harvard School of Public Health, and completed research work at the University of California. He is chairman of the Ethiopian National Scientific and Technical Research Advisory Committee and executive director of the Ethiopian Science Foundation at Addis Ababa. Professor Lemma also founded the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Endocrinology at Nairobi, Kenya, in 1969. He is a member of the Club of Rome.

What attracted you to the idea of the Club of Rome?

I knew Dr. Aurelio Peccei from a meeting of the International Institute for Environmental Affairs, of which we are both board members. He told me about the Club of Rome in 1970 in Paris.

After your association with this organization for some three years, what is your evaluation?

I have mixed feelings. I am still forming my opinion. At first glance, the Club of Rome is a committee of people from mostly developed nations. They have so far been mainly looking at what the prospects of the future could be from their own vantage point.

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Business, finance, economy in general.

Yes, perhaps. And, along came the MIT study, Limits to Growth, which shook the world community, although it has hardly penetrated into Africa so far.

Why not?

I don't know. I think some of the African reaction was based on the view that Limits to Growth mainly dealt with the future problems of the developed world and it simply was not their business. On the other hand, some Africans I have talked to who did read the book expressed genuine interest. There was lively concern about what the MIT group is trying to teach us. I am not an economist. I am not a politician. I am a simple biologist. But even as a biologist, I am intrigued by the methodology used to relate human survival to human needs through studies of resource depletion, population explosion, limits of energy, and so on. Such a study shows the genuine interest of the Club of Rome in humanity at large, the world as a whole. They have now constructed a first world-model, feeding information of all types into the computer and receiving answers which predict the situation twenty, thirty, forty years from now. My own interest and possible contribution to the work of the Club of Rome is to interest African economists and computer experts to see if we can use these systems dynamics models to predict the future of less-developed countries in the world.

For instance, I would like to see some studies on what the factors are that are causing the widening gap between the developed and the developing worlds.

What are some of the major causes of this constantly aggravating situation? We must study, in the light of our findings, what could be done to remedy the causes of this gap.

The accent of the MIT study and most or all models of this kind seems to be on technology, economics, and finance. But what about the psychological, the human factor?

This is very true. On the whole, the human factor has been neglected in Limits to Growth. The biological adaptability of humans under various constraints has not been considered. For instance, we are getting used to and even depending on many material things, such as oil and energy derived from oil, which we did not have a hundred years ago and which some parts of the world such as rural Ethiopia still do not have. Many parts of Ethiopia and other similar countries have hardly used any source of energy apart from locally available material such as wood, cow manure, oxen for farming,

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donkeys for transport, and so on. Over eighty percent of the Ethiopian people have never used oil as fuel. These people cannot miss what they have never had. The energy crisis, as we see it today, is really a problem for those who are dependent upon it.

Another factor which has been bothering me for some time is the following. Take a developing nation, like my own. We want to set up some industries, and the developed countries assist us. They sell us, let us say, machinery based on the use of modern energy, oil or a byproduct fuel. Those who sell us the modern machinery are well aware that in thirty years or so the kind of energy that makes the machines run will not be available anymore. On top of this, between now and the time that we will all be running out of oil, the price is increasing rapidly. It will skyrocket, even. Afterward, what happens? And this is not all.

The prices will go up. Therefore, whatever we produce in the future will be a lot more expensive. The rise in prices will accelerate even further.

What happens after the energy is used up? The developed nations possess the know-how. They have the machinery and so on. They will most likely develop alternate sources of energy. But this in turn will demand higher levels of sophisticated technology, which most of the developing nations do not have and cannot build, either, in the relatively short period of time that we have ahead of us. Therefore, what is going to happen is that we are going to remain underdeveloped in the future, too.

In my view, this is fundamentally wrong and unjust. And to return to the human factor and humanity as a whole, these aspects have not been deliberated upon and given the attention they deserve. Mostly, the MIT study has discussed how we can keep our comfortable lives; how we can continue to drive our big automobiles and so on, instead of considering how to resolve problems of the poor and improve conditions for all of humanity, in order to survive.

All humanity, you mean, in rich and poor countries alike.

Indeed. This is my belief.

Do you discuss these matters with your students? Are the young people in Ethiopia delving into these questions?

I am afraid I cannot really give you a satisfactory answer. Somehow, we do not seem as yet to look beyond the immediate future. We in the developing nations could learn from the approach of the Club of Rome to look at the long-range future. This is a very positive contribution of the Club of Rome to the Third World. We have not been able as yet to look fifty, or a hundred

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years into the future. In our part of the world, people are still starving; they are hungry for elementary education; more than ninety percent cannot even read or write. The farmers are often too poor to buy the ploughs upon which they depend. The people demand more education. They want elementary improvements. The emphasis in these areas of the world should be on developing the masses rather than training an elite to enable them to look into the distant future at sophisticated levels!

As far as the the so-called population growth problem is concerned, we have had no major complications in this respect in Ethiopia. As a matter of fact, most of the developing nations in Africa have hardly reached a point of concern about overpopulation, because we have vast underpopulated areas. Take the Sudan. Its land mass is equivalent to the entire area of Europe, while its population amounts to only about twenty-five million. We not only have vast lands in Africa, but we also have abundant natural resources. So at this point we are not worried about this.

The principle question we are faced with in most of Africa is how to assist in developing rural communities; how to help raise the standard of living and teach people to improve not only themselves, but their methods of farming. In Ethiopia we have, for example, initiated a better educational system geared mainly toward rural development.

You mean the present Ethiopian regime initiated this program on behalf of the peasants?’¹

Yes, under constant pressure from within and from abroad. Instead of increasing the number of our big universities, we have begun a program to educate as many people as possible up to the sixth grade. We teach them how to farm, how to improve their livestock, what tools to use for ploughing, how to construct plumbing, and so on. After these courses they return to their villages. The majority of the population can become self-reliant, while a small minority of brilliant students will continue into higher education. Perhaps this explains why, in a country like Ethiopia, we think of the basic needs of the population rather, than on the level of the Club of Rome and others, who worry about being able to continue to live in luxury.

1 This interview was conducted in 1974, prior to the revolutionary developments in Ethiopia leading to an overthrow of the feudal ruling class by the military, and initiating land reform programs for the peasantry.