Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Africa’s point man at the Copenhagen climate-change summit next month is prime minister of drought- stricken Ethiopia, a former Marxist rebel who favors tailored suits and has coaxed billions of dollars in aid from the West.

Meles Zenawi, 54, who trained as a doctor before taking up arms and eventually toppling the country’s Communist regime in 1991, in August was named climate spokesman for Africa, the continent scientists say is most vulnerable to global warming.

Envoys for the Dec. 7-18 Copenhagen meeting were given a taste of Meles’s clout at climate talks in Barcelona last week when African delegates staged a one-day walkout to demand the developed world cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 40 percent. Meles has threatened a similar exodus at Copenhagen, which could derail an agreement as he’ll represent 52 of the 190 nations present when unanimity is always sought on global UN accords.

Meles is a serious negotiator, said David Shinn, former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia from 1996-1999 and current adjunct professor of international affairs at George Washington University in Washington. “The guy is very smart, he doesn’t wing this stuff,” Shinn said in an interview.

He also leads one of the most impoverished countries on the world’s poorest continent. Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia have suffered five years of drought and periodic floods linked to climate change that affect millions of subsistence farmers.

Meles demands industrialized countries such as the U.S. and Britain that released most of the historical emissions to compensate developing nations for climate damage they caused in recent decades. He also seeks subsidies to install clean-energy equipment. The cost to richer nations: $67 billion a year.

Climate-Change Costs

That request has some foundation, according to European leaders who last month endorsed an estimate that the developing world faces total costs of 100 billion euros ($150 billion) a year by 2020 to cope with climate change and to limit emissions.

No accord is possible in Copenhagen without climate aid, the 27-nation European Union has said. Developed countries have refused to endorse an aid package in almost two years of talks.

In the last half-century, forest cover in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, has fallen from 40 percent of land area to an estimated 3 percent, causing widespread erosion as farmers felled trees for cooking fires and to clear tillable land.

Meles may be the “ideal” climate negotiator for the continent, Rhoda Tumusiime, the African Union’s agriculture commissioner, said Oct. 20 from Uganda, citing his knowledge of the issues and dealings with the U.S., Europe and China.

‘Has Charisma’

“We believe he has the charisma to engage with these global powers,” Tumusiime said.

Search for African leaders in power long enough who have international credibility and technical knowledge of climate issues and “you come up with a very short list,” Shinn said of Meles last month.

A spokesman for Meles in Addis Ababa declined an interview request for this story.

Meles, a father of three who has run the nation of 80 million people for 18 years, is fluent in Amharic spoken across Ethiopia, Tigriyna spoken in the country’s north and Eritrea, as well as English.

Born in Adwa, site of a 19th century Ethiopian victory over Italian colonial forces, Meles quit his studies to become a doctor at 19 to join the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, an armed rebel group opposing the country’s Communist Derg regime.

After the TPLF and allies from Eritrea ousted the Derg in 1991, Meles took control. A former Marxist, he established a one-party state, then built ties with the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. While in office, Meles earned a master’s in business administration from the United Kingdom’s Open University.

Failed African States

Meles promoted the climate-change issue during an African Union summit in February in which he warned leaders that global warming could increase the number of failed states in Africa.

“The fate of countries and continents is likely to be determined by how well and how fast they adjust,” he said in Addis Ababa.

Africa may experience higher temperature increases, encroaching drought, more intense storms and rising seas that affect coastal cities like Lagos and Alexandria, Egypt, United Nations scientists say.

“The issue of climate change has become a priority for us because Africa is the worst-hit continent, the most vulnerable continent by the issue of climate change,” African Union Chairman Jean Ping said Sept. 17 in Ethiopia’s capital.

Meles has focused on the subject as the effects of climate change hit Ethiopia’s economy, which is dependent on rain-fed agriculture, said Negusu Aklilu, director of the Ethiopia-based Forum for the Environment.

Malaria More Common

“The temperature is increasing and droughts are becoming more frequent” in Ethiopia, Negusu said. The warming has had other effects, with malaria becoming common at higher altitudes.

“If it was 1,000 meters above sea level no one would think of malaria. Now in some places malaria can be found more than 2,000 meters above sea level,” Negusu said.

Meles has been criticized for his human rights record by Ethiopian and foreign rights organizations, including Brussels- based International Crisis Group, which cite his imprisonment of opposition leaders such as Birtukan Mideksa. Security forces loyal to Meles killed 193 people in Addis Ababa in 2005 after demonstrators took to the streets to protest election results.

In local elections in April 2008, opposition parties won just three of 3.6 million seats after many candidates withdrew citing intimidation, according to the U.S. State Department.

His regime’s “democratic rhetoric has not been matched by democratic practice,” an August report from the International Crisis Group said. Meles has countered that Ethiopia is striving to build a democracy in a corner of Africa littered with failed states such as Sudan and Somalia.

Cigarettes, Tennis

The cigarette-smoking, tennis-playing Meles says he seeks to build a “lily-white capitalist system.” The government remains the largest force in Ethiopia’s economy, controlling ownership of all land, two-thirds of the banking system and monopolies in electricity, telecommunications and aviation.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, Meles became a closer ally of the U.S., which provided intelligence and logistical support to Ethiopia’s two- year Horn of Africa war against Islamists in Somalia that ended with an Ethiopian withdrawal in January.

Ethiopia won $3.6 billion in debt relief from the World Bank and other donors in 2006 and receives more than $2 billion in aid annually from developed countries, who provide food aid for 13.7 million Ethiopians, about one-sixth of the population.

The U.S. trains the country’s army and provided some $850 million in aid last year, including 464,000 metric tons of food.

G-8, G-20

Meles was chosen to represent Africa at the G-8 summit in Italy in July and the G-20 summit in London in April.

He has won support from environmental and anti-poverty groups concerned that Africa will be outflanked at the Copenhagen talks by industrialized countries that produce most of the world’s carbon emission pollutants.

“We need African delegations to become more vocal in the negotiations,” said Jerome Frignet, a France-based campaigner for the Greenpeace environmental group. “African countries can’t send 500 negotiators like the U.S. can.”

The talks in Copenhagen are scheduled to be the final round of United Nations-led negotiations for a climate accord to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The U.S. and China, the biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, are stuck on such issues as the amount of aid richer nations should give poor ones to deal with climate change and how much industrialized economies should pledge to reduce emissions.

‘Simply Immoral’

“The justice of our cause is so patent that we do not expect anybody in the international community to reject the minimum conditions that we set,” Meles said Sept. 16. “I think it would simply be immoral.”

Asked what would happen if the African delegation walked out in Copenhagen like it did in Barcelona, Elliot Diringer, who oversees international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said that UN agreements are taken by consensus so “it would make a deal impossible. But that’s in no one’s interest so I wouldn’t expect it to come to that.”

As the rhetoric on climate change escalates ahead of the Copenhagen summit, Meles has “set himself up as the spokesman for Africa,” said Saleemul Huq, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “The high-level decisions will filter through him.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at