By Mike Wooldridge BBC News, Ethiopia

Meles has been in power for the last 14 years

The day before sitting down with Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, for the Talking Point discussion, I was in an area of the north of the country that encapsulates many of the challenges facing Ethiopia.

Sekota was one of the places worst hit in the drought and famine of the mid-1980s which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

People flocked out of the small town and the villages around it in droves, initially looking for work to keep them alive, and later simply for food.

Some were so weakened by hunger they died along the way.

This was then an area contested between the Marxist military regime of the day and rebel forces.

Today in Sekota, 14 years after Mr Meles became Ethiopia's leader, conflict is history but remoteness is still an issue, and many people still live marginal lives.

This remains an area highly prone to drought, and the subsistence farming here is as tough as it comes.

Life or death

The formality of the brown-panelled prime minister's office in Addis Ababa inevitably seemed a world away from Aweku, a cluster of thatched homes on a stony hillside where I had listened to mothers living from hand to mouth and watched a farmer guiding his oxen across a field that seemed to defy being ploughed.

Agriculture, and the government policies that are a life or death matter for villagers like those in Aweku, are the key issue in Ethiopia, and it was inevitable that Talking Point would dwell on it at some length - particularly as the Meles government is taking steps to remove some of the uncertainty for those who are chronically dependent on food aid.

Meles believes ending reliance on food aid is realistic

The prime minister told Talking Point that people had "every right to be sceptical" about his aim to rid Ethiopia of its dependency on food aid by 2007, but he believed it was realistic.

But one of the things the government is not doing is privatising land ownership.

It has long rejected the argument that this would be an incentive for investment in agriculture, and would encourage individual small farmers to try to make their plots more productive.

Challenged on this in e-mails sent to Talking Point, Mr Meles insisted that if there was controversy over the issue, it was not in the countryside but only among urban Ethiopians and Ethiopia's donors.

He also said in the programme that Ethiopian farmers had indefinite "use right" of land.

They could rent it, farm it and pass it on through their children, and the only thing they could not do was sell it.

But this has now provoked something of a new debate.

Talking Point subsequently received an e-mail from an Ethiopian who said the idea of peasants having an indefinite right to use their land was known only by the prime minister, and if it was true it should be put into law so that local authorities could not "take land arbitrarily" from people.

In a programme that ranged across the domestic political scene in Ethiopia in an election year, the continuing fallout from the Ethiopia-Eritrea war of the late 1990s, and the highly topical issue of whether the huge international response to the Asian tsunami disaster was likely to have negative impact on aid to Africa, Mr Meles returned several times to the theme that what mattered most was what Ethiopia - and Africa - did for itself.