As techniques for boosting farm yields go, loading peasants into trucks and resettling them far from home has been conspicuously unsuccessful in the past. Stalin killed millions in the process. Ethiopia's former Marxist dictator, Men-gistu Haile Mariam, was slightly less ruthless, but only slightly. In the 1980s, he gave some 570,000 people the choice of moving or being shot. Parents and children were sent to opposite ends of the country. Many found life in their new areas intolerable, tried to walk home, and perished en route. Odd, then, that the present Ethiopian government, whose leaders overthrew Mengistu in 1991, should be attempting something that sounds quite similar. Fed up with their humbling annual appeal for food aid, they have started moving more than 2m peasants from dried-out plots in the highlands to fertile soil in the west of the country. The hope is that these farmers will, at last, be able to feed themselves. The timescale for this ambitious scheme is just three years.
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