Ethiopia PM: world not serious on climate change

By Barry Malone

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who will represent Africa at next month's Copenhagen climate change talks, said on Thursday it was unlikely the world was serious about tackling global warming.

The United Nations summit in Denmark will try to agree on how to counter climate change and come up with a post-Kyoto treaty protocol to curb harmful emissions.

"It is highly improbable ... the world is serious about climate change and (will decide) to take effective measures to tackle it," Meles told an economic conference in Addis Ababa. "But no one can say such an outcome is completely impossible."

Meles has become Africa's most outspoken leader on climate change and has argued that European pollution may have caused his country's ruinous 1984 famine.

Aid workers say a five-year drought, worsened by climate change, is afflicting some 23 million people in seven east African nations, with Ethiopia worst affected.

Meles has demanded the rich world compensate Africa for the impact of global warming, and says the funding would help develop the continent's agro-industries.

"Such a revival of the bedrock of Africa's economies would revitalize our strategy for managing chronic poverty in the short-term while laying the basis for overall economic transformation in the long-term," the prime minister said.

"POTENTIAL ENERGY NICHE"