By Jason Mclure
(Bloomberg) — Nurita Kadir huddles with dozens of women and babies in a fly-infested white tent in the southern Ethiopian town of Senbete and waits for a meal for her starving five-month old child.
Kadir, clad in a black headscarf, is among as many as 4.6 million people the World Health Organization estimates have been left hungry after spring rains failed. The drought is draining grain stores in villages across a third of the country. She’s depending on foreign aid as criticism mounts that the government isn’t doing enough to tackle the crisis.
“The rains didn’t come,” Kadir, 36, said in a June 11 interview, as her child lay on a brown blanket beside her. “I had nothing to eat so the milk stopped.”
While people like Kadir are getting help, the number in need of food is growing, the Geneva-based WHO says. Aid has been hindered by the government’s attempts to downplay the crisis as a famine in the mid-1980s, the worst on record, still sullies the country’s image today, according to Gus Selassie, an Africa analyst at London-based political risk consultancy, Global Insight.
The famine two decades ago caused a million deaths, sparking a global charity effort led by Bob Geldof’s “Do They Know it’s Christmas,” hit song and the Live Aid concerts.
“The issue has been a source of friction between the government and the aid community,” Selassie said. “They feel the issue has been detracting from their economic success. They are trying to downplay it.”
Estimates Dismissed
Estimates in May by the United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, that 6 million children need food aid have been dismissed by Ethiopia’s health ministry. With 78 million people, Ethiopia is the second-most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria.
The government has guaranteed electricity to export businesses such as flower farms. At the same time, power outages at factories that produce children’s porridge have reduced their output in recent months by as much as 50 percent, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme’s Country Director, Mohammed Diab.
“We can’t forget about other activities” such as flower farms, Simon Mechale, the director of Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency, said in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. “I don’t think we should compare this to 1984-1985.”
The IMF in April forecast economic growth of 8.4 percent this year. Even so, surging food prices pushed the annual inflation rate to 39.1 percent in May, the latest data available, according to the national statistics agency.
Fighting Rebels
From January to June the WFP said it distributed more than 45,000 metric tons of food to 2.6 million people. Still, in Ethiopia’s Somali region, where the military is fighting against ethnic Somali rebels, less than a third of the 9,600 tons of food allocated by the UN for relief has actually been distributed, the organization says.
No official statistics on the number of deaths caused by the famine have been released by the government.
“We don’t have the right figure now on deaths,” Tewordos Adhanom, the country’s health minister, said at a June 3 press conference in Addis Ababa. “We don’t need to beat the drum of hunger for Ethiopia every year. Ok, there is a drought in some parts, but we shouldn’t exaggerate.”
The government in May announced plans to buy 150,000 tons of wheat from South Africa. No wheat has left South Africa for the east African country since then, according to the Web Site of the South African Grain Information Service. The Addis Fortune newspaper today reported that the government will also buy 30,000 tons of corn from South Africa.
Food Shortages
“Currently 4.6 million people are affected by food and water shortages,” the WHO said in a July 11 statement. “Food insecurity is increasing.”
Government grain stocks are now below 100,000 tons, less than a quarter of their normal level, the WFP’s Diab said. About 391,000 tons of grain is needed by November, he added.
“It’s desperate,” Bjorn Ljungqvist, country director for Unicef, said in an interview in Addis Ababa. At risk are “50,000 to 100,000 kids over the next four months. If these kids don’t get support, between 25 percent and 50 percent will die.”
This year’s drought in February and March, which cut some harvests by 95 percent, came after a poor harvest in the country’s autumn season. Farmers in the area often feed families of eight from half hectare (1.24 acre) plots and reap two harvests a year, according to Kadir.
Rains Have Fallen
While rains have now fallen across fields that were planted in late May the next crop won’t be ready for at least three months, aid workers including Ljungvist say.
“We have lost all hope,” Larago Barisa, a farmer in the village of Lencho, south of Senbete, said. “In the surrounding areas you see green plants you wouldn’t think there is hunger, but when you step into the houses you will find nothing.”
The government is sensitive to criticism because the 1980s famine occurred under the rule of the Derg, the military regime that ruled between 1974 and 1987.
A comparison with the 1980s famine is to say the current government is “not better than the Derg,” Ljungqvist said. “That’s why this is so sensitive. As long as they agree there are a significant number of lives at risk I am not going to argue that they are wrong and we are right.”
Kadir has little interest in the squabbling. Her family sold four of their eight cows to raise money for food while the others died.
“We’re done,” she says.
3 thoughts on “Ethiopians Wait for Aid, Meles regime Downplays Drought”
No no meles hasn’t downplayed the starvation now is engaging in image improvization campaign..
This is the trick they play-first you deliberately starve a certain region to have a “kodak” moment with big belly swollen face babies and then take a team journalists and have them picture them so they could flood world media -the the lords of poverty or voltures- NGOs-in addis gather and provide an emergency food appeal to donor nations-so far those stages have been succesfuly completed and the required money to sustain the vampire regime of meles is either in the pipeline or donated-so far in the neighborhood of 800 million dollars. After exuasting all these avenues now, meles is making fun of our nation saying the drought has been averted-if you want you could go to aiga and read an interview at aiga forum…now here is their stupudity how on earth could they avert the famine while the harvest has been collected yet, while the donated food hasn’t arrived in the port yet, while the donated money hasn’t gone through the banks yet and so on- they have just started the image building campigh too early and this is an ample evidence that the mean spirited regime of meles has always been using starvation as another tool to gain financial strength…This is a man who ahs no shame to sit every year among the richest nations and beg on his knees and also try to teach them economic-poverty economics that is- the story is long!
So elaise, this regime is evil from head to toe! and, ofcourse, the NGO’s in addis don’t need to be asked if they could jump after every drought season their response is how high mels want them to jump! the resultant effect of such tradition of begging yearn and year out is the formation of a nation that lives at the hand of donor nation literlay a wellfare state! This is meles’ legacy!! And, he brags for his successful beggary every time he get a chance! Shame!
By Kevin Myers
Thursday July 10 2008
No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia’s (and Bob Geldof’s) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia’s population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.
So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn’t count.
One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .
Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.
It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, letter-writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O’Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it.
But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30pc. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia’s has more than doubled.
Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.
Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually
hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.
This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the next president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.
Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa.
They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.
Meanwhile, Africa’s peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.
So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?
How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.
For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.
It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates’ programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.
If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that’s an idea.
[email protected]
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir: Frank McCourt
This Irish writer for Irish Indepent paper forgets his history and does seem not to gather enough information.
The above titled book written a while ago by an Irish English teacher in New York City about the sorrowful and tragic family history in Inland comes to my memory. The book deals with a specific Irish family which came to USA but failed to survive and the family went back to Ireland and could not survive the harsh reality of the country few decade ago.
It is a true document by the teacher who really beautifully depicted his place under the British Imperialism imposed upon the Irish people until recently. It was an eye opener to the whole world and to any body who wanted peace, freedom and justice for the Irish people. It was a moving story told by a son of Irish family how his father was not able to take care of his dead mother out of poverty and diseases .
Hunger and starvation was one of the biggest guns used by the British to make the Irish people submit to their rules for centuries. The family never had enough food to eat or the father had any job to earn enough money for the family; if he did any he spent it on alcohol
Frank was very young when his mother passed away and her body was cremated and they were trying to transports it somewhere in Northern Irald big city and since his father was alcoholic they went to the pub and the father got drank and forget the ashes in one of the pubs in a big city.
When they realized they did leave the ash on the counter top in one of the pubs they kept running around to recover it. Even after death a body of an Irish mother was abused it had a penetrating message to all of us.
The immediate reason seems to be the alcoholic father but it was the system that had made so and forced his father to behave so irresponsibly towards his own dead wife.
A man was abused by a colonial system to lose his own respect and respect for the dead. This true story took place in our own life time and the book was a big hit and it was made into a Hollywood block buster movie in late eighties. I loved reading the history of the Irish people and their endurance against tyranny of the British Lords and colonialism. The history of enslaved Irish people very scary and frustrating history.
But the current writer seemed to forget the history of his own people after mere few decades of property of Ireland and the coming of peace and freedom after they managed to throw away the yokes of British Imperialism . They are very gallant people and if you want to know bravery and endurance go and read the history of the Irish people. Belfast and Dublin from the north to the South they stood up for their freedom and finally they got it.
We must do that and never depend on any kind of help from the west. It is wasting us as an nation and as a people. An economist from London School of Economics once told me he figured out that we did not need spoon feeding but must be self reliant people to fish by own to manage to harvest enough food for our people. To come back to the writer from Irish Independence he seemed to get angry at our leaders and the civil wars that had engulfed the who African continent for many years now. He is giving us a message that we must be able to create peace in our country as they had managed to stop warring and building Ireland from one of the poorest nation in Europe to the second richest country within just 200 years.
If our people want something new we may look deeply into the current history of the Irish people and especially their ability to turn around their country in all respects of world economies and within the European union. I am a kind of intrigued about their abilities to attract so much investments to their country. How did they manage to create such a strong economy within two decades.? How did they get the educated class and forced it to be one of the richest modern middle class in the history of the whole Europe?
The writer is talking to us from this point of view and inviting us to do something for ourselves.
One correction to the writer he does not know all parts of Ethiopia and all our people do not depend on
Food aid to make babies. They work hard and produce their foods to live as a nation. Too much exaggeration.
Sabataa Dubbii