The $3.5 billion-a-year tourist industry is booming, and niche sectors such as off-season horticulture and Arabic-language software are thriving exclusively with private funding.
Now roses and vegetables are flown weekly to Amsterdam and London, the products of a horticulture industry employing 6,000 workers, whose exports are worth about $60m a year.
Aside from coffee, qat (a narcotic leaf chewed by Somalis), horticulture and a little tourism, Ethiopia is one of Africa's very few countries that still has virtually no serious private business and thus few jobs outside the state sector.
After buying, planting then leaving behind shrubs in someone else's garden a couple of times, Bagehot long ago gave up on long-term horticulture, and now given some outside space to play with just about runs to a tub or two of lavender and the odd geranium.Nor is inter-generational conflict likely to get any better.
A question of character Better ways to collaborate And the winners were... Powering the drive Read all about it Nuclear's next generation Fields of automation Son et lumière meets surgery Beyond the ether ReprintsJust as the mechanical reaper transformed the economics of cereal farming, a new wave of agricultural automation promises to do the same in other areas of horticulture.
Even those uninitiated in horticulture can tell the difference based on the respective shape of their leaves.
Sunil Mittal, boss of Bharti, a mobile-telephony giant that is branching into agribusiness, thinks horticulture offers a better chance of creating large numbers of jobs, because India has plenty of farmers, and fruit and vegetables are far more labour-intensive than rice or wheat.
Now the bits of the economy that have bounded ahead are those, such as horticulture, that owe little to the politicians.
A recent party of foreign businessmen was similarly unimpressed, bewildered at her argument that Myanmar needs horticulture more than garment factories.
He reintroduced to English gardens many plants that had gone out of fashion, particularly roses.He gained all the medals and other honours that horticulture can grant.
The study detects a shift from field crops towards higher-value horticulture and livestock farming.
