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Your Excellency, Ato Ahmed Side, State Minister of Finance and Economic Development,
Ladies and gentlemen,
This is a most pleasant duty for me to sign a grant agreement for food assistance, amounting to 550 million yen, equivalent to 102 million birr. I do hope that the imported wheat to be procured by this grant will be distributed to areas which face food shortages. It is my strong desire that this project will be conducive to a stable supply of food in Ethiopia.
It was in 1983 that Japan started food assistance based upon the current scheme. Since that time the total direct food assistance extended to Ethiopia is about 9.6 billion yen, equivalent to 1.9 billion birr.
From a medium-term perspective, I would like to point out that the GTP has food security as an important policy objective in the coming five years. In the high growth scenario, food production of this country is expected to double in the five-year period. This is a very ambitious target, indeed. Yet, in order to achieve this target, it is critically important to encourage and help small farmers to drastically increase their productivity. Therefore, Japan will continue to support the agricultural development of Ethiopia as it has been doing in such areas as irrigation, seeding and so on. Naturally, Japan will gradually shift its priority from food assistance to agricultural development in its ODA to Ethiopia. |
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