Please allow me to say a few words about our country and about the importance of agriculture in the Ethiopian economy. Ethiopia, with an estimated land area of about 1.1 million square kilometers is the ninth largest country in Africa. Ethiopia enjoys a wide range of agroecological diversity with corresponding diversity in flora and fauna, for many of which it is the original home. Despite this, however, our country has become synonymous with hunger and poverty over the last two decades or so. We grow a wide range of crops but the yields our farmers harvest are extremely low compared to what is achieved on experimental plots and even in field demonstrations.
Pests are among the major causes of such low yields.
The Government of Ethiopia has been taking giant steps towards achieving these goals both during the transition period and currently under the Federal system. As I stated earlier, the centre of our agricultural development plan in Ethiopia is the smallholder. It is a gratifying coincidence that this workshop is being launched at a time when the Government of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has been undertaking an aggressive five year agricultural plan that can make significant contributions towards agricultural development in our country. I am aware of the fact that we are very far from this scenario, for now, but we should learn lessons from this situation and therefore our future thinking in agricultural research and development should take sustainability of agricultural production into account. Thus we have recently appointed a national IPM coordinator to help strengthen the research, coordination and popularization of this approach in our country.