Ethiopia: Owning Our Resources!

opinion

There has been a lot of discussion on who is exploiting these resources and who is benefiting from them. Scary numbers have emerged proving that only a very few benefit largely from what should have been the benefit of the many. Cases like Equatorial Guinea rich in oil, that have an average income per capita over 21, 000 USD but still have a large number of the population living under the poverty line, demonstrate the need for a change in the way that these natural resources are managed. This has brought about different organizations and campaigns seeking transparency in natural resource management on the side of the governments as well as companies exploiting these resources. It was reported that Africa has lost 1.2 trillion in illicit trade, which is three-fold the total amount that Africa receives in aid. These numbers are cause for alarm. What I have described above has to do with the loss of physical natural resources. There's another type of resource that Africa is slowly and quietly losing. An article in The Guardian, a UK-based daily newspaper, entitled "Move Over Quinoa, Ethiopia's teff poised to be next super grain", has grabbed the attention of Ethiopia and the world at large. Teff is clearly gaining popularity across the world as its nutritious value has been "discovered" by the West. Teff is gluten free, rich in calcium, iron and protein. For most injera eaters, teff was just teff but now teff is that newly discovered highly nutritious "in style" food. The demand for teff will certainly increase in the coming years and recipes on how to make pancakes, noodles and different pastries with teff will become more frequent. Although there is a ban on exporting raw teff grains, the number of injera and teff- based products exports in Ethiopia has increased as well as Ethiopian-owned stores that sell teff products around the world. The article asked important questions regarding whether Ethiopian farmers will benefit from this and cited the example of quinoa and Latin America.

As we become more excited about the marketability of our teff, we must consider an important event that happened last year involving teff. An organization that had a contract with the Ethiopian government went bankrupt and somehow ended up transferring a broad patent that it had on the processing of teff in Europe to different companies set up by the same owners as the bankrupt one. This patent covers ripe grain, fine flour, dough, batter and non-traditional teff products. This means that this new company has the exclusive right on a broad range of teff products! The direct implication of this is that if anyone wants to use teff in non-traditional processes, as defined by the patent, in Europe they could be liable to paying some sort of royalty to these companies. This will highly affect the benefits that Ethiopia and Ethiopians will have when it comes to selling teff in the European market. These intellectual property rights that we are slowly losing at no cost to us today, will cost us more than we know tomorrow. The system that governs intellectual property is very complex and most importantly foreign and unknown to us. We have to educate ourselves so that we can protect ourselves from being victims of the system. If we don't get started on this today, we'll find ourselves regretting it very soon.

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