Biting the hands that would feed: Ethiopia

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Israel continues to lead the way in vaccinating its population. We examine what other countries will be watching closely. How the interplay between inoculating the elderly, more contagious variants of the virus and lockdowns affects the overall death rate. And it would plainly be called extortion if it weren't being done by cute little monkeys. A new experiment on macaques at a temple in Bali shows that the thieving critters have a sophisticated sense of what.

Your purse or phone is worth to you.

First up, though, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray. The turmoil began in November when civil war broke out between the federal government and regional forces led by the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or tplf. Within weeks, troops had entered the regional capital of Mekele and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared victory. But the fighting continued. Thousands have died in the conflict and more than 2 million civilians have been driven from their homes. Some 60,000 have fled to neighboring Sudan. Now the threat of starvation looms. Most of the region's roughly 6 million people have been without adequate food, water or medicine for weeks.

Ethiopia's Tigray region is facing an alarming humanitarian crisis, basically because aid workers are not able to get essential supplies to those who are affected by the war, which is essentially the entire population of the region or the vast, vast majority.

Tom Gardner is our Addis Ababa correspondent.

A top regional official, and that's one appointed by Abiy himself. He told aid workers in a private meeting on January 8 that hundreds of thousands might starve. Meanwhile, a Western diplomat told me, we could have a million dead there in a couple of months if. If humanitarian access isn't opened up significantly and urgently.

And what is daily life like in.

Tigray right now outside of Mekele, the regional capital, where things are marginally better. Banks are closed, markets have stopped, shops are shuttered, fuel has run out. That's been the case since the war began, really. In early November last year, I met one man who'd fled from Tigray to Addis Ababa and he said to me, even if you have the money, you don't have a bank. If you have grain, you. You don't have a mill. If you have mil, you don't have power. And that seems to be pretty representative from the accounts we're hearing. On top of that, hospitals are running empty. Hospital staff have not been paid since October, according to Medicine Sans Frontiere. Doctors Without Borders, who've had more access than most every hospital they've been into, they found entirely looted.

And all of this is just the knock on effects of the conflict in Tigray, which it sounds as if is still going on.

Right, so the war began in the start of November. It was the culmination of long standing tensions between the TPLF, which ran the region and for 30 years was the dominant force in the federal government in Addis Ababa, the capital as well, until 2018 when they were pushed out following mass protests and replaced by Abiy Ahmed, the Prime minister. The tensions between ABY and the TPLF simmered for two years before erupting eventually towards the end of last year. More than two months later, the TPLF appears to be in disarray. I mean, it has been ousted from the regional capital and it's waging something akin to an insurgency in the countryside. Now, its troops control quite a lot of the countryside, particularly in the center of the region. It doesn't control major towns. Its leaders, including the ousted president, have been essentially awol. We haven't heard from them for over a month. And some of the founding members of the TPLF have been captured or shot dead. So the fighting continues, especially in central Tigray. But the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, he believes it's only a matter of time now before the rest of what he calls the junta are captured or killed.

But this whole conflict was the result of the federal government looking to take control of a restive region. Now they have a restive region with a humanitarian crisis. What are they doing about that?

To start with, they dispute these accounts of a humanitarian crisis. Earlier this week, a spokesman for the Federal Disaster Management Agency said in an interview that there is no starvation in Ethiopia. A couple of days ago, the Federal Ministry of Peace claimed it was distributing aid to almost 2 million citizens in northern Ethiopia. And the Minister of Peace told me that they were even reaching Central Tigray, which is largely under the control of the TPLF forces. So that seems implausible. I mean, TPLF forces regularly attack military convoys, so it's impossible for the government to deliver supplies safely. And then on the other hand, these emergency supplies being delivered by the UN and international NGOs, they can't get into these areas either because they're not being allowed by the army, which controls access. An agreement that the UN signed last month with the federal government, which was supposed to allow them and allow aid groups to travel freely throughout the region, that's basically not been honoured. Four UN staff were shot at and detained last month for entering areas which a senior government official later said they were not supposed to go. And that points to the key question here, which is, is the government being deliberately obstructive? And a lot of people in the diplomatic and humanitarian community reckon it is. One UN diplomat told me that the lack of humanitarian access is part and parcel of the war campaign.

And is there any other means for these aid agencies to get through, whether or not the government's actually being obstructive?

Well, in situations like these, typically the UN or international aid agencies would talk to whoever controls the territory. In this case, that would mean talking with TPLF forces in order to guarantee safe passage into those areas I mentioned of central Tigray, which are outside of federal control. I think that's anathema to the government, really, because it would bolster the TPLF or would be seen to legitimize it. And also because some of that food they fear might land in rebel hands. And then added to that, there is the northernmost part of Tigray, which is actually occupied at the moment by troops from neighboring Eritrea who've been fighting alongside Ethiopian government forces. So to enter those areas, aid groups need to actually be talking to the Eritreans, and that's proving really difficult.

And what about international pressure? Is there anything that outside countries could do to try to make things easier?

The European Union last week said it was suspending aid payments worth $107 million until there's full humanitarian access. It's also sending a negotiator to talk to the Ethiopian government specifically about this. With the new administration in Washington, there might be renewed pressure from the US which is also a big donor, but it may have little effect. Successive Ethiopian governments, I have to say, have been guilty of subordinating humanitarian concerns to political ones in the past. A famine in 1973 was infamously covered up to avoid embarrassing the government of Emperor Haile Selassie. A decade later, their military dictatorship blockade Tigray for fear some of it would end up in the hands of the tplf, which was then a ragtag band of guerrillas. But there is still a window of opportunity. Aid workers say that there is not yet a fully fledged famine in Tigray, at least in the areas that they have some access to. But there is a real danger that history might yet repeat itself unless something is done.

Tom, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the.

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For many, these are the darkest days yet of the pandemic. Hospitals around the world are once again buckling under a torrent of COVID 19 patients. But in Israel, the mood is changing. This week, pensioners at an assisted living facility in the city of Netanyahu held a dance party to celebrate receiving their second and final injections. Israel is at the vanguard of the immunization rollout, and it may already offer insights into how quickly vaccines can turn the global situation around.

Israel has been vaccinating very quickly, so some of the early data is starting to trickle in.

Slovea Chankova is our healthcare correspondent and.

What they found in one study where they tracked a group of 200,000 people over 60 who were vaccinated and compared them with a similar group who are not vaccinated. They found that for the first 12 days of the study, the positive test rates in the two groups remained similar. On day 13 is when the first difference started to emerge. But it wasn't really until two weeks after vaccination that the rate of infection in the vaccinated group really plummeted by about 33%. So this means that vaccination probably prevents not just symptoms of COVID 19, but also infection with the virus and therefore infectiousness to other people. And this is very, very important because it's one of the critical things that you need to stop an epidemic just to prevent people from infecting others.

And has anything that's come out of Israel so far given an indication as to the importance of a second jab or its timing?

Not yet. They're still too early in the vaccination process to be able to measure how effective a single jab might be. We will know very soon. Such data is also being collected in Britain, where vaccination is proceeding at a fast pace.

And you say those data from the over 60s indicate a plummeting of infection rates. Is that starting to translate into anything of pressure on the health system?

There is no clear data yet on that. But it's also to keep in mind that as you start vaccinating, usually you start with the very elderly. However, when you look in hospitals, intensive care units, which are under immense pressure in many countries, have mostly people who are in their 50s and 60s, partially because other people are often too frail to be put on ventilators and other organ support machines. They in Britain, for example, you have probably about as many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s in intensive care units as you have people over 70. So until you vaccinate great share of middle aged people, intensive care units in hospitals will continue to be under quite some pressure.

And we spoke on the show earlier this year about the speed of Israel's vaccination program, but also about returns to lockdown. Does that not skew the evidence that's coming in on who's getting infected?

Yes, it does. Israel has been in lockdown for quite some time now, and it's also having a more contagious variant of the virus, one that was found in Britain in December, spreading very rapidly. So all of that is happening at the same time as vaccination is really being ramped up. So you have these three effects on infections happening at the same time and untangling. How much vaccination matters is quite hard really. But many countries around the world are in the exact same situation. In Europe, in parts of the United States, you have more contagious variants spreading, you have lockdowns and you have vaccination proceeding. So what happens in Israel will be watched very closely by all of these countries to get some idea of what they should be expecting in the coming months.

So with all those confounding factors. How soon do you think Israel will see a roll off in the death rates? And what do you think is the likelihood of outbreaks after that?

So the most encouraging sign, perhaps from Israel, is that cases have started to decline. Yesterday was the first day in over two months when they saw a drop in the daily number of cases. And at their vaccination rates, they may be able to see the number of deaths starting to taper off sometime in March. By then, they expect to vaccinate about 80% of adults with two doses. What's important to keep in mind, however, is that even then you will have a large number of people who are not vaccinated. No vaccines have been approved for children yet. Approving them will take time, probably until the end of this year. And then you will have some proportion of adults who will not be vaccinated for medical reasons or who just refuse to be vaccinated. What this means you will have still quite a few people susceptible to infection. So you will see outbreaks throughout the year even after you've vaccinated a substantial proportion of the population. But the pressure on hospitals is definitely going to ease up.

Liva, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

They're a notorious crime syndicate in Bali.

Preying on tourists, sunglasses and camera bags.

And holding the goods hostage until their ransom is met. Researchers have been studying the long tailed macaques living at the Uluwatu Temple to understand some subtlety that goes beyond just petty thievery. The creatures seem to be thinking in terms of what their victims are thinking, and that might even reveal something about human nature.

The monkeys seem to be able to work out whether items are more or less valuable to tourists and to hold out for larger rewards.

Jeff Carr is the Economist's science and technology editor.

So, Jean Baptiste Leca of the University of Lethbridge in Canada, he was a primatologist, decided he would visit Bali with his team and investigate this to study how sophisticated the monkeys were in their robbery.

So how did they go about investigating that?

They wandered around the temple with video cameras and every time a monkey looked as though it was taking an interest in a tourist, they started filming. And sometimes that came to nothing. And sometimes the monkey attempted to steal something from the tourist and sometimes the attempt succeeded. And they recorded about 2,200 successful robberies and the negotiations afterwards.

And what did the negotiations actually entail? What were the objects involved?

The monkeys have been playing this game since time out of mind. And the temple authorities keep three sorts of food available for tourists to negotiate with. These are raw eggs, bags of fruit, and crackers. Now, each monkey has different preferences. Some prefer the eggs, some prefer the fruit, and some prefer the crackers. The researchers tried this experiment out. They would offer each monkey a choice between two food items in circumstances where they could only pick one and discover which ones they like best. So they knew for each of the monkeys that they were following which were the most valuable items of food to that particular monkey.

But how did they establish the relative value of the stolen objects for the tourists?

So the tourist property was divided into six categories, ranging from empty containers to things like wallets and mobile phones with hats and shoes in the middle. And they discovered that there were basically three levels of property that the tourists were interested in, which nicely matched with the three different sorts of food reward that the monkeys were interested in. The crucial point of the experiment, what it was trying to do, was see if monkeys could understand that things that had no real value to them have value to others and could be exchanged for something that the monkeys themselves value. And the monkeys were able to do this. They got better at it as they got older. Adults were very good at it, some adults not so good at it, and juveniles not at all. The juveniles understood well enough to steal things, but they didn't understand that some things were more valuable to the tourists than others, Whereas the adult monkeys understood that very well, and they would negotiate quite hard for either more food rewards or more desirable food rewards in exchange for things that were more valuable.

So it seems that the monkeys learn over time how to negotiate better.

That's exactly correct, yes. They learn guile as they get older, like human beings. One of the reasons this study is interesting is it shows that these animals have an insight into the minds of others. They're able to understand to a certain extent what human beings are thinking, which is a different species. That's quite impressive. And this goes quite deep into the question of what intelligence is for and how it evolves, because big brains are expensive to run. And there's a theory called the Machiavellian theory of intelligence, which is that the main reason to develop intelligence is to understand and manipulate other members of your social group. And so this is some evidence that for the. In favor of the Machiavellian intelligence theory.

I will forevermore look on monkeys with more suspicion.

Very wise.

Jeff, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence.

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