European Union will support 1 trillion Euros for investment in mitigating the ever growing climate change effect over the next decade, the commission revealed.
According to a press release, European Commission President von der Leyen said Europe has planned to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, slowing down global warming and mitigating its effects.
He pointed out that “what European businesses and change-makers need from us is easy access to financing. To pull this off, we will deliver a Sustainable Europe Investment Plan. It will support 1 trillion Euros of investment over the next decade. We will work hand in hand with the European Investment Bank, Europe’s climate bank.”
The president revealed that next March, the commission will propose the first-ever European Climate Law to chart the way ahead and make it irreversible: investors, innovators and entrepreneurs need clear rules to plan their long-term investments.
Noting that forests burn from America to Australia and desserts are advancing across Africa and Asia, the union has been pulling changes to deliver a Sustainable Europe Investment Plan, he added.
Mankind has seen such phenomena before, the president said, adding that but never at this speed. He stated that Ethiopia, for instance, is experiencing untimely rain recently.
“In addition to climate-induced drought often witnessed, Ethiopia is currently experiencing untimely rain which compromises its harvesting season. Science tells us that we can still stop this epidemic, but we are running out of time,” Leyen stressed.
The president also appreciated Ethiopia’s effort as part of this European and global movement for climate.
“Last year, Ethiopia reported to have planted more than 350 million trees in 12 hours, beating world record and a comprehensive 4 billion trees during the year.”
According to him, nine European citizens out of ten ask for decisive climate action saying “We will work hand in hand with the European Investment Bank, Europe’s climate bank for Europe and a contribution for a better world.”
Information and Climatology Director at the Agency, Melese Lemma, said the Agency releases updated forecast three times a year to create awareness and give emergency alerts coordinating with international agencies.
“Our forecasting is not based on only from our own forecast; we have not sophisticated models. We use international forecasting models. There are international forecasting centers which disseminates information. For instance, the Pacific Ocean has been given forecasting for so longtime combining the three months events to be happened like ways Indian Ocean. So, we take international outputs,” Melese stated.
African countries have been calling on the world to consider the continent as a special case in terms of implementation of the Paris Agreement and climate finance during the recent COP 25 Summit in Madrid, Spain.
The Paris Agreement is an agreement reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris, France, where the world’s nations undertook a determined course to reduce climate change.
EU to support 1 Trillion Euros of investment for sustainable climate dev’t
ICT The way forward
The majority of businesses in Ethiopia do not have websites to promote their businesses for the online community. Business processes of most companies in Addis Ababa are manual. To this end challenges in access to digital infrastructure like Broadband; access to reliable electric power; under developed digital service provision; and others are among the challenges that the business community faces.
Mesay Hailemariam Moreda is CEO of Ronabit Consult. He has more than a decade of experience in multidisciplinary fields. He successfully led projects such as Integrated Social Security Administration System project, the exam registration and placement and the Unified Billing Project of Ethiopia among others.
Currently his company is developing many national strategies in the field of ICT including the Ethiopian national government strategy of National Network master-plan, ICT for community development strategy, Vendor management assistance, and Procurement Management assistance.
Capital sits with Mesay to talk about the challenges businesses face and how ICT can intervene. Excerpts;
Capital: What can you Identify and prioritize ICT related services and actions which support the transformation of the Ethiopian businesses for realizing effective and efficient services?
Mesay Hailemariam: For example, a media company could deliver personalized and targeted advertisements via their websites and related tools. Hospitals may further engage their patients to interact with specialist using short texts, chats, and even videos. Retail businesses directly on conducting online using web-based systems and electronic online payment systems could be a common example of this. The manufacturing sector Using of Robots and drones for various business related activities. Sharing economy using a digital platform is another example. Selling any extra goods as services for example extra car-seats; extra car time; extra store; extra room could all be sold as a service using software applications.
Capital: What are the major legal, business and capacity challenges undermining the role of ICT for promoting businesses in Ethiopia?
Mesay: We can list many challenges. Lack of awareness and Knowledge of the Business community about the business benefits of Information communication technology is among the leading challenges.
According to a study conducted by Ronabit Consults in 2018, for example, majority of Businesses in Ethiopia do not have websites to promote their businesses for the online community. Significant number of businesses in Addis Ababa own computers but primarily use they it as a type writer. Many own smart phones but use to browse social media contents. Business processes of most companies in Addis Ababa are manual. Business processes facing customers are in the first-row to be automated; I think, the reason is they are not usually profitable. Customer facing process automation do not usually have a direct relationship with revenue generating or profit bearing activities and cheaper when done manually. Their return on investment is indirect and takes relatively long-term to pay back – as they mostly pay back through efficiency and customer satisfaction. The other challenges Access to digital infrastructure like Broadband; access to reliable electric power; under developed digital service provision; etc are among the other challenges. This is actually challenging the existing business models in a positive and progressive manner 
Capital: You have an ICT support strategy document that can guide future interventions towards supporting the business community to benefit from the ICT sector?
Mesay: In my opinion, Businesses could benefit from ICT in many ways: such as; the first and most obvious benefit is introduction of efficiency to their business processes especially those facing their customers. The marriage between Entertainment and Information processes (which we usually call Infotainment) is possible through automation of customer facing processes. Customer facing processes are very useful as they capture data; and data is the new oil – and for me, automating the data capturing process is like drilling an oil well.
The second benefit is Revenue generation: Usage of technologies in businesses may directly generate revenue; maximize profit margins; or minimize losses by providing additional services. For example; our concept of taxi before 3 to 4 years was to go to a roadside, wave our hands to a blue car with a label on it; negotiate a price and pay at the destination – usually prone to renegotiations of prices and disagreements. Now, from the convenience of your sofa, you just run a mobile app; click once or twice; and before you know it, the nearest Ride driver will call you – then you have a taxi. Name of the driver; Plate number; color of his car, will be displayed on your mobile and you know everything that you need to know. And at your destination, the total price is displayed on your phone and the on the phone of the driver- you are at your destination safely and pay without a hassle. Such business models could be applied to every spare good you have. May be your store that should stay empty for some time; your children’s’ rooms while they are at the university; and may be your bakery & Juicer. As far as you can imagine a business model, and have an online application, literally any extra service of good could be shared with others and generate revenue. The government as a policy maker & regulator in Ethiopia should work harder to cop up with this. A study by Ronabit consults in 2019 have reviled that the progress of ICT for revenue generation is growing relatively faster than ICT for process automation in Ethiopia.
Capital: What policy issues do you think is pertinent and streamline the ICT sector in such a way that it plays a pivotal role for enhancing trade and investment in the country?
Mesay: I call ICT – Smart everything. I mean smart building, smart manufacturing, smart transport, smart city; Going smart brings efficiency to business processes and generates revenue at the same time. Internet of things, Industrial Internet of things, Smart Manufacturing and smart Industry to enhance trade and investment in the capital and in the nation at all.
Capital: what is the role of government in expanding cloud computing?
Mesay: Newly established organizations usually lack capital to establish their own data centers. They are either required to start manually or delay their entry to market until they make capital to do so. As a solution, they may subscribe for datacenter services where they pay for the services as they use just like water, electricity, and other utilities. I strongly argue in favor of development of large scale local data centers with strong data protection and privacy policy to provide these services. We call them cloud based services by the way. Studies show that there is a visible gap in the regulations. To fill this gap, the government, in a short period, could form a digital Economy Council as an advisory board establishes focused taskforces to expedite the process of legal and regulatory matters to take base in Ethiopia. It is also important to establish concrete promotion & stimulation strategy for the digital economy that promote start-ups through a focused, competitive, and effective incentives structure. It is better done before the African Continental Free Trade Agreement takes full effect.
Capital: How does Ethiopian businesses be ready in a tough competition that would face in connection to opening up their doors for African market because of CFTA?
Mesay: First, let us see what African Continental Free Trade area is. As you know, it is the largest free trade area with an estimated market size of almost 3.0 Trillion dollars. From the digital technology or digital economy perspective, it creates very big demand for e-commerce. Thus, intensive package delivery and trade logistics for customers in Ethiopia other member countries should be improved. Next, what is its benefit for digital economy? One Benefit of AfCFTA is that it lowers or illuminates tariff providing free access to the market and market information throughout Africa. Our private sector could benefit from these expanded markets for goods and services;
Capital: Are Ethiopia Businesses ready to reap these benefits?
Mesay: AfCFTA brings not only opportunities. It comes with its own challenges: One: policy makers and regulators of Ethiopia will greatly be challenged to develop or adopt the non-existent regulations. Two: It greatly increases competitive pressure on the already under-developed local private sector. Producers in Ethiopian may lose huge sales to foreign suppliers due to the cost associated to producing the goods or services. Large companies will definitely get advantage through economic of scale. They may sell cheaper, and Ethiopian companies may not compete in some goods and services. They may not even comeback to competition quickly.
Free trade and developing countries
Cogent criticisms have been made about the ability of the doctrine of comparative advantage to deal with the obvious global disadvantage of developing countries. The concern here is that ‘in a world of uneven development free trade, or even trade per se, may be inherently unequalising. There is a range of economic arguments that explain why the doctrine of comparative advantage may be unable to deliver its promised welfare benefits to developing countries.
One of the important general arguments in this context is that comparative advantage is created and cumulative, rather than natural, being based on historical development processes, acquired skills, cultivated industry patterns or “first mover” benefits, so it can change over time, can be shaped by governments or industry leaders and can decay through neglect. If this is so, then the cumulative comparative advantage of developed countries will ensure either that inequalities remain or that they take an unacceptably long time to disappear.
Another important school of economic thought postulates perpetual inequalities as a consequence of free trade. According to this argument, where there is low elasticity in demand for the exports of a country but high elasticity in domestic demand for imports, then export prices relative to import prices will result in a continuous trade deficit. As this tends to describe the terms upon which at least some developing countries export their primary products and import manufactured products, it is argued that under free trade conditions these developing countries will remain trapped in a trade deficit preventing them from realising the welfare gains promised by free trade doctrine.
These are not, of course, the only explanations for the current trade deficit and retarded economic development suffered by developing countries. It is certainly the case that the adverse economic position of developing countries has been exacerbated by the fact that they have been denied comparative advantages that they might have otherwise enjoyed. In this respect two factors, in particular, are worthy of note.
The first is that the requirements for the global protection of intellectual property rights, the large scale benefits of which are overwhelmingly enjoyed by undertakings based in the developed world, deny to developing countries any comparative advantage that they may have accrued in the processes or imitation of certain manufactured goods and in incremental innovation. To place this in context, it is essential to understand that many of today’s developed countries once placed extensive economic reliance on the unfettered ability to copy manufactured goods emanating from other more developed economies.
Secondly, the trading position of many developing countries is adversely affected by the fact that developed countries have continued to protect their domestic markets for certain primary products and manufactured goods exported from developing countries. However, the extent to which the opening of developed country markets to such exports would alleviate the trade deficits of developing countries remains a matter of debate amongst economists.
The protectionism of developed countries is a response to what is perceived as a potential flood of ‘cheap imports’ from the developing world. It is not uncommon for industries in developed countries to argue that, in order to survive, they need protection from such imports, which are made on the back of low labour costs in developing countries. From the free trade point of view, this argument denies to developing countries their legitimate comparative advantage. In economic terms, some questions have been raised about the validity of this free trade argument given that many of the employers of low- cost labour in the developing world are multinational corporate interests, which marry high technology with low cost labour in order to achieve an advantage that gives little in the way of welfare benefits to the host developing country.
In addition to this, it is not clear that the developed world market for cheap manufactured imports from developing countries functions in quite the way that classical free trade economists postulate. Theoretically, the comparative advantage of the developing country will be realised when developed world consumers purchase the cheaper imports rather than more expensive domestic products.
However, increasing numbers of consumers in the developed world eschew the products of low-cost labour on ethical grounds. This not only shows the limits of economic theory but also indicates that the debate about free trade should transcend arguments about the validity in solely economic terms of the doctrine of comparative advantage.
Ethical concerns about the exploitation of labour, whether by multinational corporate interests or by domestically based interests, are one of a number of non- economic arguments that may be made about an unfettered free trade regime. What these arguments have in common is the rejection of wealth maximisation as the ultimate measure of human happiness and attainment.
As Keynes famously wrote: “If it were true that we should be a little richer, provided that the whole country and all the workers in it were to specialise on half- a dozen mass-produced products, each individual doing nothing and having no hopes of doing anything except one minute, unskilled repetitive act all his life long, should we all cry out for the immediate destruction of the endless variety of trades and crafts and employments which stand in the way of the glorious attainment of this maximum degree of specialised cheapness? Of course we should not – and that is enough to prove the case for free trade . . . has left something out. Our task is to redress the balance of the argument”.
The critique of free trade based upon the rejection of wealth maximization draws stark attention to the difficulty in attempting to divide the political and the economic. The decision to embrace a free trade regime is not, and can never be, a purely economic one. Rather, it is a political choice involving, amongst other things, economic considerations. Joseph Stiglitz underlines the significance of this point: “There are important disagreements about economic and social policy in our democracies. Some of these disagreements are about values, how concerned should we be about our environment (how much environmental degradation should we tolerate, if it allows us to have a higher GDP); how concerned should we be about the poor (how much sacrifice in our total income should we be willing to make, if it allows some of the poor to move out of poverty, or to be slightly better off); or how concerned should we be about democracy”.
Overall, the debate on the non-economic merits and de-merits of the comparative advantage doctrine is one that even the most thoughtful modern proponents of free trade. In this, as in so much else, modern free trade theorists appear to be embracing a type of intellectual foreclosure that dates back to the work of Adam Smith. Adam Smith postulated non-economic effects of free trade, both positive and negative. On the positive side, both he and Ricardo cited cosmopolitanism and international harmony as a non- economic benefit of free trade. However, Smith saw that the pursuit of material wealth had less desirable effects.
Holiday Market stable
Seble Hagos was going out holiday shopping at merkato with a list over a meal on Tuesday. The list included many dishes which would require beef and vegetables, but her family’s special request was for doro wot (chicken stew). For this delicacy, she needed onion, butter and chicken among other ingredients.
Since Ethiopia still retains the ancient Julian calendar it has a holiday season in which Christmas falls on 7 January (of the Gregorian calendar) and Ethiopian epiphany January 19 (of the Gregorian calendar). The fast of advent is carried out to cleanse the body and soul in preparation for the day of the birth of Christ. It is celebrated after 43 days of fasting known as Tsome Gahad. Christmas is quietly shared and celebrated in groups of friends and family
by eating the meat of chicken or lamb or beef accompanied with injera and the traditional drinks. The joy of giving and sharing extends beyond religious beliefs and spreads the spirit of peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind throughout the world.
Unlike sable, many Ethiopians consider the three days before the festival as the best time for shopping, especially for food items, however the preparation for the festival begins before one or two weeks before. As shoppers begin their spree in many markets of the Addis, home to 3.4 million people, the sight was overwhelming. With many rushing to get their last-minute shopping done, some were feeling the burden of seasonal expenses, others exhausted
“The market is doing pretty good this holiday,” for sable a mother of 3 who was shopping for various food items for four hours in merkato and “the prices of butter, eggs, vegetables, red pepper powder and onions have not shown much increase.”
She bought these items from retailers, like Semahegn Yalew, who was preparing his shop in merkato for the holiday market. Suppliers like him get butter, eggs and chicken from various parts of the country, mainly from Harer, Gojjam, Arbaminch and Jimma. He sells an egg for 5.50-6.00 br- similar to the price during the Ethiopian New Year holiday, whereas a chicken would set consumers back between 380 br and 550 br at his shop. Semahegn said “this holiday, the prices, the supply as well as the demand are better.” 
Anyone who passes through merkato on holidays will visit the traditional place butter market, commonly known as qibe tera, a part of merkato, for a traditional butter retailer like Alemayehu, who was selling a kilo of butter for 250 br and 320 br- lots of even if lots of customers complain about the price of the butter there are still lots of customers who specifically look for this because of the quality of the butter.
Stores in Atkilt Tera, the biggest open vegetable market in Addis, was flooded with consumers like Rediet, who came to buy onions. A kilo of onions was sold for 13 br to 16 br almost similar compared to the price last year as well as during the past three holidays. “I believe the price is fair, unlike other times when it soars as the holidays approach,” said rediet, who bought 10 kilos of onions to make her families favorite, doro wot.
Like the onion market, a similar trend was also observed in capital’s biggest cattle markets. Addis Andualem one of the cattle traders at Kera, one of the largest cattle market is waiting the last days of the holiday to warm up the market.
Kera was built almost half century ago. It is now one of the five major cattle markets in Addis Ababa including Kara, akaki, shegole, bercheko cattle markets. It hosts all sorts of customers including those who own butcher houses as well as individual customers.
Even if the market center at Kera has the capacity to accommodate an average of 2,500 cattle and 3,000 sheep and goats at a time according to Addis it is receiving only cattle from different parts of the country, mainly from Harer, Wellega, Bahirdar, Jimma, Gonder and Wolayita among others.
Usually, sale of livestock inside the center reflects significant seasonal variations on demand and supply. According to the traders, usually, the price is based on the type, size and origin of the cattle. In this respect, cattle from the Harari region come up with the highest price with about 35,000 -50,000 birr, while those from jimma and gonder fetches -15,000 birr to 20,000 birr and that of wollega ranges between 20,000 birr to 30,000 birr bahirdar 25,000-40,000 and cattle from wolayta costs the least price in the market between 15,000-20,000.
Fitsum, a friend of Addis says the market is showing 1500 to 3500 birr increase in price in comparison to similar holidays over the years. This is because of decline in supply of the cattle related with the political unrest of the country and even if the situation seems changing quite the price doesn’t.
As Addis said, this season has better supply and demand of cattle will have a direct impact in the price even if the price seems stable and show a downward trend it will boom in the last two days of the holiday until the eve of festivities. Kidane who spent more than 20 years on the cattle trade, he is looking for much profit in compression with recent holidays as he stated the in 43 fasting days the market to cattle shows decline than before so there is better supply of cattle. 
Demand and supply are heavily influenced by the consumer habits connected to religious practices and festivities. According to the traders the kera cattle market is prefabbed because it is close to the Addis Ababa abattoirs enterprise which operates service facilities related to slaughter for meat production with safe, hygienic and efficient livestock slaughter for butchers. According to Shewalefa Yetbarek, director at the enterprise, they are expecting about 3500-4000 cattle and 2500-3000 goat and sheep’s for the slaughtering service on Christmas day. When it compares with last holidays the slaughtering service is declining because of the extent of illegal slaughtering in the city is becoming one of the big challenges causing health damage and damages on the waste product of the cattle’s that the city’s officials choose to remain silent. According to Shewa, the illegal slaughtering shares about 60 percent of the overall slaughtering in the city. Onions, chicken, butter as well as cattle is a welcome sign as the food inflation showed a slight decline, to 20.8 percent in November 2019 from 18.6 percent in the prior month.
Beside the normal markets in recent times huge exhibitions and bazaars are becoming relatives to the city in times of holidays; two exhibitions have been opened three weeks before the holiday; one at millennium hall and one at exhibition center. According to Awgichew Abiye financial & non-financial service manager at commercial nominees and coordinator of the exhibition, more than 290 international and national suppliers and producers are participating on the 20 day exhibition with their different products and more than 600,000 consumers are expected to visit until the eve of the holiday. Beside their price this kinds of exhibitions are use full since they gather consumers, retailers and producers together, said Awgichew. 
Biruk and his friend Chobe where at the center on the evening of Tuesday December 31, to buy a clothes and gifts for their relatives, even if gift giving is a very small part of Christmas festivities in Ethiopia small gifts are exchanged amongst family and friends at home. The steady prices of products used for gift shows increase in such season. According to the two friends, the price of products at the exhibition is much lower than the outside market “we have bought cotton shirts by 350 birr which is sold more than 650 birr out side.”
