Peace meal: Ethiopia’s civil war

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer and in.

New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Something unusual is going on in Britain's labour force that isn't happening in other rich countries. People at the older end of their working lives are disproportionately dropping out. We ask why?

And when you hear the phrase crypto rave after you stop shuddering, what do you think of sweaty half clothed programmers hopped up on substances of dubious legality? Well, our correspondent attended one and found it a surprisingly sedate affair.

But first, After almost exactly two years of civil war in Ethiopia, a seemingly sweeping peace deal has been reached. The conflict started with long brewing tensions between the federal government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the leaders of the northern region of Tigray, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, or tplf. The TPLF had been ousted from their influential position in government. A scuffle about elections taking place during the pandemic led to a full on military campaign against the tplf.

Heavy fighting has broken out in Ethiopia's.

Tigray region, according to diplomatic sources, amid.

Rising fears of a crisis that could destabilize the country and spread across the Horn of Africa.

Abbey thought the campaign would take mere days as it spilled into weeks and months. The fighting drew in neighboring ethnic based regions in Ethiopia and even border countries such as Eritrea as it threatened to ignite the entire region. The conflict unleashed untold brutality and hunger on the people of Tigray, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. This week, leaders from both sides announced they were at last ready to lay down their arms.

The two parties in the Ethiopian conflict.

Have formally agreed to the cessation of.

Hostilities as well as to systematic, orderly, smooth and coordinated disarmament.

Olasegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president who headed the talks, said the agreement marked a new dawn For Ethiopia, the country certainly needs one. As the head of the un, Antonio Guterres, pointed out, this is very much.

A welcome first step, which we hope can start to bring some solace to.

The millions of Ethiopian civilians that have really suffered during this song, this conflict. The agreement brings hope to millions that the horrors of war may be over, but that is still a lot to hope for.

So, on paper at least, this should be cautiously welcomed, because it is expected to expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid to Tigray. It should stave off the worst effects of the famine, which is thought to have killed hundreds and thousands of Tigrayans.

Tom Gardner, himself ejected from Ethiopia during the conflict, is our East Africa correspondent.

But it is very much early days. We don't know how this will be implemented, whether it will be implemented at all, and nor do we know what it really means in terms of the prospects for lasting peace in Tigray and also other parts of Ethiopia.

So how did these peace talks, this peace deal, come together?

Well, they were organized by the African Union. They were supposed to begin at the start of October. They were then delayed for what were described as logistical reasons until the end of October. They were delayed even then by about 48 hours. The head of the Ethiopian delegation, the Deputy Prime Minister, Demaki Makonnen, didn't even show up at all. So very few people were optimistic that there would be any sort of deal. In fact, I remember talking to a UN official a week ago who said, nobody, not the Americans and not the un no observers really expected anything to come out of this. So in that respect, the fact that we have a deal now is a shock and has been seen as that by many observers, including many Ethiopians.

So what is it that changed? Was it something about the battlefield situation or any change of heart?

I think the battlefield situation is probably the key point. I mean, in the last couple of weeks, the Ethiopian army and its allied Eritrean forces had been making significant advances into Tigray. They'd captured several important strategic towns and appeared to be bearing down on Mekele, the capital of Tigray. In fact, people were suggesting maybe a week ago that what was more likely was that the Ethiopian army would capture Makele and then declare victory, rendering the ongoing talks redundant. The Tigrayan side were pushing back strongly against that. In last week, they said that they'd actually halted the momentum of this advance and were about to start counteroffensives. That seems to have been, I would say, bluster, because what seems to have been agreed looks more like the terms of surrender on the part of the Tigrayans than a peace agreement where both sides make concessions.

Why do you say that? What's the meat of the agreement that gives you that view?

Well, most importantly, it provides for the Tigrayan defence forces, the TDF, to disarm effectively within 30 days, which is astonishingly short amount of time. It also indicates that there will be a, what it describes as an inclusive interim administration to run tgro. That's the federal government's preferred option. It basically renders the tplf election victory 2 years ago null and void. And it allows for the federal army to take over towns, federal installations, military installations, airports, facilities like that throughout Tigray, which is a military occupation of the region in all but name.

So there's a certain finality then, in the way that you describe it. Yet at the same time, over the course of the two years of this war, we've spoken before about a ceasefire that crumbled spectacularly. Do you think this one will hold?

Well, this is certainly different from the previous ceasefire, which was never made public. What exactly had been agreed? This is much more formal. It's a written agreement. It's signed. It has international observers and guarantors. In theory, it also goes way beyond just a ceasefire or a secession of hostilities. In the technical jargon, it essentially provides for the political relationship between Tigray and the rest of the country, between the Tigrayan authorities and the federal government going forward. So in that sense, this is different. But I would caution that it's far too early to expect this to lead to a lasting peace, partly because we don't know how it's going to be implemented. As I said, 30 days to disarm the Tigray Defense Force is a pretty tall order, particularly as there might well be considerable resistance to that inside Tigray. Remember, Tigrayans have been saying for two years that they've been facing a genocidal war. It seems unlikely to me that they will willingly relinquish their arms as they regard as their first line and last line of defense without a fight.

But the other point that we've talked about throughout this conflict is how much it's drawn in other factions, other regions in Ethiopia, other countries in the Horn of Africa. How do you see all of that playing out?

Right, so there's two things here. Firstly, the big elephant in the room is Eritrea. Eritrea's forces have been involved in this war, fighting alongside the Ethiopian army against the Tigrayans since the very beginning. They were not represented, at least officially at the talks in South Africa. Whether they will now leave Tigray remains unclear. That's going to be a massively important thing to watch going forward. Secondly, the rest of Ethiopia, there is an ongoing insurgency in Oromia, the largest region which Abi comes from. There is no mention of that in the agreement. They were not represented at the talks. Will there be a separate process or will there be an escalation of the military approach to resolving that conflict going forward? Absolutely no indication that there is anything new planned on that front either. So the Ethiopian army is going to continue to have to fight battles on more than one front. I mean, Oromia is not the only one in addition to Tigray that it's fighting. So the capacity of the Ethiopian state to continue trying to bring order and stabilize the country is going to remain stretched regardless of this peace deal.

And what's your feeling on how Tigrayans themselves feel about this deal?

Well, Tigrayans abroad and outside Tigray do seem to be bewildered. I mean, one friend of mine described the feeling as shock, indignation, denial and condemnation, the whole package. So there's going to be a political cost to this. But I think we should acknowledge that even if the guns fall silent just for a short time and aid entered the region, if the famine can be mitigated, that is a good thing and that will be welcomed by Tigrayans on the ground who have been suffering for more than two years now. I think people will be cautious. They don't trust the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies to protect them. But if they do see some improvements and food arriving, the restoration of basic services like telecoms, phone lines, then people may start returning to their homes, returning to their lives. That would certainly be a positive for the region and for the country as a whole. So in summary, some reasons for hope, for optimism, but this is certainly early days and many reasons to be skeptical about the contents of this deal.

Tom, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of British workers have left the labour market.

My name is Brenda Pugh. I'm 62 years old. I left work a few years ago due to a long term health condition.

Many of those workers are like Brenda, longtime employees over the age of 50, taking their years of skills and experience with them.

I love my career. I mean, I've worked all my life. My early career was firmly founded in human resources and I specialized in learning and development and that I absolutely loved.

For Brenda, the decision to leave work Wasn't easy, but it also wasn't hers to make her health meant that continuing just wasn't an option.

I've got osteoarthritis and rheumatoid. Not an awful lot you can do about rheumatoid arthritis, really. But osteoarthritis, when it gets to the stage that I've got, it requires joint replacement and that does work. I can vouch for that because I've just had a double hip replacement.

Even now that her condition has improved, she thinks a return to work would be challenging.

I don't think I could go back to what I was doing before because it was full on. I was commuting to London every day. I would definitely consider doing something that wasn't full on like that. In the same sort of line, I would need support. And I tell you why I'd need support is I've lost all my confidence. The thought of going back to what I was doing. I constantly doubt myself, think, I wonder if I could do that again.

But for so many people like her, whose work is important to them, Brenda says it's something she misses.

It must be difficult for people who may be listening, thinking, really, do you really want to get out of bed at six o' clock every morning and do that horrible commute in the rain? And yes, I miss it. You miss it when it's gone. I tell you, hard as that may.

Be to believe, this thinning out of the labor force at the over 50s end seems to be a particularly British problem and policymakers are struggling to figure out why.

So in, in most other rich countries around the world, we've seen that their workforces have been rebounding after the pandemic. That's not what we've been seeing in Britain.

Georgia Banjo is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

What we've been seeing here is that older, more experienced workers are dropping out of the workforce. And the problem is really that we don't know why it's happening.

Are there any ideas as to why this is happening, particularly in Britain?

So there's quite a few theories. One idea is that it's sickness which is driving that trend. So a bit like what we heard with Brenda, older people are dropping out because they're reporting illness. This is what the universities of Essex and Edinburgh have shown. In a recent study, they found that over half of the rise in inactivity among 50 to 64 year olds was among people who are reporting illness. And, you know, if you look at what's happened over the past few years. It's plausible that that could be why. Right, so We've had the COVID 19 pandemic, we've had waiting lists in the National Health Service really spiral from 4 million people before the pandemic to 7 million people now. The only issue with that explanation is that it doesn't seem exactly to be what's happening. So if you look at long Covid, for instance, in the labor force survey, which is the main official survey here in the UK, which surveys people in the workforce, only 1% of people who've dropped out during the pandemic are reporting long Covid. And if you look at NHS waiting list, we see that only one in five of the over 50s who are leaving the workforce happen to be on an NHS waiting list.

So illness doesn't account for this, or at least for all of this. I mean, what else could it be?

So there's a big discussion going on right now, which is being driven by some new research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is a think tank here in London. So what they're saying is that the argument that people are leaving the workforce due to illness conflates two separate phenomena. So the first is that older people are leaving the workforce to retire early, but that's a separate trend to the second one, which is that there's an increasing proportion of 50 to 64 year olds who are already out of work. But now when they're answering these questions on the survey about why they're not working, they're saying it's because of long term sickness. So in other words, what we're seeing here is it's not that sick people are suddenly dropping out of work and becoming inactive, it's more that inactive people could be falling sick.

And so why is this so hard to unpick from the data?

Well, I think, as always, the issue is a lack of data or confusion in the data. So what research of the bank of England point out is that when people are asked to explain the main reasons why they're not working, you can only choose one main option. So you can say it's because of retirement, for example, or you can say it's because of sickness. So their point is, when people are answering these questions, the real numbers of long term sick are being masked in this way because you don't have the choice to put more than one option. And I think what we're also seeing is that although the UK is really, really good at saving people's lives, when they get very sick and need to use the nhs, we don't seem to be so good at helping people recover in the long term. A really good example of this is heart problems, which are one of the most common conditions reported by inactive people in the UK because they're out of work. Britain's very good at saving people once they've had a heart attack or heart failure. But when it comes to rehabilitating them, the numbers from NHS trusts are actually not so good. They're missing their targets in terms of getting people into cardiac rehabilitation. And the same is true for lots of other things as well. Physiotherapy is very important for musculoskeletal conditions, for example, and musculoskeletal conditions are the most common reason why people miss work days, because they've got a bad back or painful joints and the like. I think one of the big issues in Britain is that we're not helping people get back to their best and this is affecting the workforce.

And how is that change in the workforce then affecting things more broadly?

Well, overall, I think it's a pretty worrying trend, really, because we know that a sizable number of people are not working because of a health condition or long term sickness. So that's not good for them because. Because obviously that's a lower quality of life. But it's also not good for the country as well, because if you think about what it means if lots of people are out of work, it means smaller taxation revenues, there's less people paying their taxes, it means greater pressure on inflation, and it also means more people on sickness benefits. So it's a really kind of tricky question for policymakers, which is how can we respond to these rising levels of economic inactivity, which are so much worse in the UK compared to most other countries. And the problem, again, is that we don't really have an answer to this.

So the only thing that seems clear here is that to address the problems in the workforce is to address the shortcomings in the health service.

Exactly. So as a lot of people who work in these circles say, there's a really important relationship between health and wealth in a country. So going forward, this is something that policymakers will need to address if they want to solve the problems in the workforce.

Georgette, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks a lot, Jason.

Recently I attended a crypto rave in Bogota, which is the capital of Colombia.

Alice Fullwood is our Wall street correspondent and also presents Money Talks, our sister podcast about the markets, economics and the world of business.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was actually quite a Chicago events. The party was Taking place in a converted warehouse in the sort of industrial part of Bogota. The organizers had filled it with plants to evoke a jungle theme. The bar was serving spicy mezcal drinks. A handful of experienced DJs were sort of on the decks. The Brave was actually held on the sidelines of devcon, which is an annual conference hosted by the Ethereum Foundation. That's a knock for profit organization that arranges developers to work on Ethereum, the second most valuable blockchain. And yeah, it was a lot of fun.

So who threw this rave and who attended?

The rave was being thrown by a guy called Stani Kulchov, who is the founder of aave, which is an open source protocol through which people can lend and borrow various cryptocurrencies. So it's actually referred to as a rave rather than a rave, as a sort of nod to the name of that system. And you might expect the crypto rave to be sort of rammed with pale, sweaty programmers, but it was quite a mixed bunch. I spoke to a few different attendees, including a Colombian girl who'd just participated in a hackathon which had taken place before the conference kicked off. I met a French programmer who was working on a method to distribute aid via the Ethereum blockchain and had a lovely chat with a very cheerful Mexican guy who was waiting in line for a Ravi branded T shirt. None of them tried to shill me any crypto tokens, which was my sort of grave fear going in.

So it was basically a jungle themed networking event.

It was essentially sort of more grown up than I expected, despite being called a rave. I mean, people were definitely having a good time, drinking, relaxing after the conference, but it wasn't as anarchic as I was expecting. And I think how sort of well organised, well put together the event was actually sort of reflects something bigger that is going on in crypto, which is this newfound maturity among a community that is commonly known as anything but mature. So aave, the company that put on the event, is five years old now. It has this sort of one very successful project which is now run by a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization. Its founder, Stanie, is working on his next venture, which is a social media protocol called Lens. And it would be a platform that kind of would allow people to own their followers so you could take them from one social media app and plug them into another. And yeah, it was a professional and well put together event.

Alice, you mentioned a newfound maturity in the crypto community. What do you mean by that?

Crypto as an industry is often perceived as being quite immature, and that partly reflects that it's a relatively new technology, but also can reflect the sort of behavior and vibes of the people that are involved in it. So people getting very obsessed with certain tokens, you know, trying to pump them up. A lot of memes and jokes that sort of surround crypto can make it seem, seem quite immature. But I think what you're seeing now is we're going through another one of these downturns in asset prices in crypto, but actually the technology is sort of 10 to 12 years old now. You have these big established companies. The value of all crypto tokens has fallen back significantly, but it's still about a trillion dollars, which is around the level it was at in 2020. Even though you've had this massive slump, you're actually not seeing as much of the narrative this time that, okay, crypto was this jokey flash in the pan kind of technology and it's going to go away now. In fact, you're seeing continued investment even though valuations have come down. So Uniswap Labs, which is a company founded by the creator of Uniswap, which is another big successful defi application, actually raised $165 million at a $1.7 billion valuation during Devcon. There are a couple of other VC deals as well. You see established venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, they participated in that round. So actually a lot of these companies are quite old venture capital firms sticking with crypto. And the people that populate this space are not all immature, I guess.

What do you attribute this newfound maturity to?

So it's partly that it's been around for a while. Another important thing to point out is that actually the tech does keep getting better. So devcon, the event came on the heels of the merge, which was a big technological improvement that went through the Ethereum blockchain. It switched the mechanism it uses to, to add blocks of data to its chain and that essentially eliminated its carbon footprint overnight. And it made it a lot likelier that they'll be able to scale the number of transactions that Ethereum can do in the future and bring down the cost of them all. That is probably going to make that blockchain much more useful than it is now. And that's part of the reason why you're seeing people still hard at work building on top of it. Even though we're in one of these so called crypto winters or slumps, it's kind of a combination of those things, you know, longevity, the firms, the technology sort of all getting better. I should point out, though, that one pocket of maturity and one chic party doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in crypto is grown up. I'd actually considered going to a different crypto party in Miami about a week before devcon. And I was hanging out with some crypto people at a bitcoin brunch and I asked them whether it was a good idea to attend this party, which was taking place at a certain nightclub. They advised me that that nightclub was in fact, a strip club. So I declined to go to that party. Bitcoin strip club might be a bridge too far, but a crypto rave was quite a lot of fun.

All right, Alice, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me, John.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Stevie Hertz is our US Audio correspondent, and our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Rory Galloway, Alize Jean Baptiste and Kevin Kaynors, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias. We'll all see you back here on Monday. Sam.