Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

I just wrapped up a shoot in Ethiopia for an upcoming special called “Ethiopia, Guatemala, Hunger, and Hope,” airing on public television across the US this November. My goal is to show Americans the value of smart development and productive trade policies — and a big part of smart development is ensuring that Ethiopians have access to quality jobs, where they’ll make double the income that they would on a farm. To make the point that Ethiopia aspires to become a new source of cheap labor for the world’s more developed countries, we sweet-talked our way into one of 50 massive industrial sheds at the Hawassa Industrial Park, south of Addis Ababa. While this is hard and repetitive labor that earns very little money on a rich-world scale, Ethiopia knows that Japan and China started out as cheap labor markets before economically evolving — and it hopes to do the same.

Wherever you travel, it’s important to remember that sticking to the main road gives you road bias. Getting off the paved roads in Ethiopia, I was reminded that the majority of the world’s population are poor farmers. In fact, while I might feel like the norm on this planet, the off-the-grid farmer in Ethiopia, far from the nearest paved road, is much closer to the global norm.

I was in Ethiopia with my crew, filming an upcoming special called “Ethiopia, Guatemala, Hunger, and Hope.” It will air this November on public television across the US.

Driving through Tigray in the north of Ethiopia, we encountered a long line of camels walking to Khartoum (in Sudan, about 400 miles away), where these beasts of burden will fetch a huge price at the market. Throughout my Ethiopia trip, I noticed parallels to medieval Europe and the Wild West of the USA. Rather than cowboys taking their herd to market, this herd was run by camel boys.

I just visited Ethiopia, on a mission to learn about smart development. I’ll be sharing a sampling of my travels here over the next week — and stay tuned for my new one-hour special, “Ethiopia, Guatemala, Hunger, and Hope,” airing on public television across the US this November.

Join me now in this clip at a Farmers Training Center (FTC) in Tigray, in the north of Ethiopia. It takes a proactive government to help a poor country develop — and one reason why Ethiopia is becoming a model for African development is because of its proactive government. The country is divided into 18,000 districts called “kebele,” and each kebele has an FTC. There are about 60,000 government workers serving the FTCs, who coach farmers on climate-smart agriculture and ways to increase their yield.

As with farmers elsewhere in the world, Ethiopia’s farmers are very conservative and change-resistant, and it’s a big challenge to get old-school farmers to embrace modern techniques. They find that rather than merely decreeing a new technique, it’s most effective to convince one farmer to run with a smart idea — and when he prospers, others will want to follow his lead.