Wide Angle Profiles One Woman’s Mission to End Hunger in Her Famine-Plagued Country Through Ethiopia’s First Commodities Exchange, July 22 on PBSAnchor Aaron Brown Reports from East Africa to Document the Efforts of Ethiopian Economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin in the Market Maker-------
For my assessment of the ECX and readers' comments, click HERE - Wondwossen-------
BUSINESS WIRE
July 14, 2009
NEW YORK--Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine captured the attention of the world, one startling fact prevails: while nearly one million people starved to death mainly in the north of the country, the south had a food surplus. The problem, says former World Bank economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin, is that the country lacked the economic mechanism to smoothly move commodities from one part of the country to another. Gabre-Madhin, a Cornell undergraduate at the time, saw clearly that the devastating famine was not a result of a lack of food but lack of food distribution. Haunted by the skeletal figures she and the rest of the world saw on TV, she realized that her mission in life was to find a better solution to feeding her country. And she wanted to do it without relying on foreign aid or new agricultural technology.
Wide Angle, THIRTEEN’s award-winning international affairs series on PBS, and anchor Aaron Brown travel to Ethiopia where Gabre-Madhin has founded the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), the country’s first national trading network. The ECX is designed to stabilize the prices and monitor the quality of Ethiopia’s major crops including wheat, maize, sesame and coffee. Gabre-Madhin hopes the ECX will revolutionize an age-old market system whose inefficiencies have been partly responsible for the country’s persistent food shortage.
Premiering Wednesday, July 22 at 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), Wide Angle: The Market Maker follows Gabre-Madhin and her team during the ECX’s first year of operation. Since ringing the opening bell on April 24, 2008, Gabre-Madhin has been frantically traveling the country to survey rural markets and convince distrustful farmers and traders to join the Exchange – all the while facing daunting obstacles ranging from poor infrastructure to government intervention to, not least, the global economic crisis, which threatens to scuttle her project entirely.
The Market Maker features small-scale farmers like Mekonen Motbaynor, who, like so many of Ethiopia’s farmers, are blessed with fertile land and have an entrepreneurial attitude toward agriculture, yet are crippled by the country’s volatile markets.
Wide Angle anchor Aaron Brown also speaks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to explore the macro-economic implications of the Exchange. If successful, the ECX could become a model for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where hunger and malnutrition are projected to rise in the coming decade.
Visit the Wide Angle website – www.pbs.org/wideangle – for original reporting, web-exclusive videos, and audio interviews. Watch full episodes, download podcasts, and read exclusive commentary from Aaron Brown.
Wide Angle is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG. Tom Casciato is Executive Producer. Nina Chaudry is Senior Producer.
Funding for Wide Angle is provided by PBS, Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation, Judy and Josh Weston, the Estates of Helen and Sam Roseman, Bernard and Irene Schwartz, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the Dr. Robert C. and Tina Sohn Foundation. Corporate support is provided by Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. Additional funding for educational materials is provided by The Overbrook Foundation.