By Andrew Geoghegan | ABC Australia

TONY EASTLEY: Almost a quarter of a century after Ethiopia’s last major famine the country is again in deep trouble.

The failure of recent harvests and rising food prices have left eight million people in need of aid.

Africa correspondent Andrew Geoghegan visited some of the worst affected areas of Ethiopia and met an Australian woman trying to help those in dire need.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: A three hour drive south of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa is the town of Shashamane.

Recent rain has turned the land green, but it’s too little, too late, food is scarce.

(Baby cries)

This baby is severely malnourished.

“I cannot feed my family,” says her mother. “Even if I try by all the energy I have.”

Sophia Husein and her family are among the eight million Ethiopians who are in desperate need of food aid.

VALERIE BROWNING: The baby’s born small from the mothers’ malnutrition probably, so basically we’ll have to treat the little girl with antibiotics now.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Australian Valerie Browning has an intimate understanding of the plight of Ethiopians.

VALERIE BROWNING: Just very recently we hit the worst, we hit literally death by hunger of little children and I hadn’t seen that in 19 years.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Valerie Browning works for a local aid group. She settled here two decades ago after falling in love with the land and its people; people who are now suffering.

VALERIE BROWNING: If we don’t work now, right now then we’ve lost the day. I really believe that.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: A quarter of a century ago Ethiopia became a byword for famine.

(Bob Geldof song plays)

Images of children dying of starvation prompted Bob Geldof to launch Live Aid. Since then Ethiopia’s population has doubled and now world food prices are soaring. Opposition politician Gebru Asrat says Ethiopia has failed to learn from the past.

GEBRU ASRAT: To see another famine in this country after 24 years is a sad thing where millions are starving.

VALERIE BROWNING: Most families are down to two meals a day. Some are down to one.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Valerie Browning.

VALERIE BROWNING: I’ve seen them mixing tiny bits of grain with huge amounts of water, boiling it up and calling it porridge and drinking that as a meal. And they are desperately hungry people.

TONY EASTLEY: Australian Valerie Browning ending that report from Andrew Geoghegan in Ethiopia. And there’ll be more on the Ethiopian story on Foreign Correspondent at 9.30 tonight on ABC1.

Ethiopian Review’s List of Top 10 Things President Barack Obama should do during his first 100 days in office

1. Give the genocidal regime in Ethiopia 6 months to release all political prisoners, lift all restrictions on the press, allow the formation of an independent elections committee that is composed of representatives of opposition parties, and hold a new election within one year. Or else, cut all financial and military support, impose travel ban on Woyanne officials, and freeze their assets in the U.S.

2. Issue an executive order allowing immigrant families in the U.S. who are separated from their loved ones in foreign countries to unite immediately. Some families have been separated for over 5 years for no reason other than bureaucratic backlogs.

3. Introduce a legislation to the U.S. Congress that will eliminate the current tax code (thousands of pages) and replace it with a one page law that sets a 15 percent tax for every one who makes $30,000 or more. Those who make less than $30,000 per year will pay no federal income tax. They will pay only local sales taxes. This will help stimulate the economy, generate more tax revenue, and reduce the size of the government.

4. Introduce a program that will retrofit all federal buildings with solar panels.

5. Release from prison those who are incarcerated for non-violent (also known as victimless) crimes such as insider trading. Instead, make those convicts work certain hour per week to pay the society for the crimes they committed. This will help reduce the 2 million U.S. prison population by a significant number, without letting those who violate the law go unpunished.

6. Authorize NASA to launch a mission to land man on the planet Mars. Invite the private sector to help fund the mission.

7. Reaffirm citizen’s the right to bear arm by encouraging states to abolish gun permits. Only those who are convicted criminals should lose their right to bear arm.

8. Reaffirm that the Internet will remain a tax free zone by signing a pledge.

9. Organize a White House-sponsored annual science fair, in collaboration with the private sector, where top 10 inventors will receive up to $100 million.

10. Eliminate visa requirements for Ethiopians for helping Obama win Virginia (wishful thinking).

By Michealene Cristini Risley

Behind the stench of flowing sewage and the smell of disease is a country that is beyond collapse. Yet, nowhere are there more signs of bustling activity than the countries graveyards. On a bright day, in Unit L graveyard in Chitungwiza, the staff opens up 50 new graves for burials. Those allocated graves will be used up far before Sunset. The increases in burials in this cemetery are up 150 percent. Every few minutes families take turns burying their loved ones. They dig; they grieve and then depart; perhaps wondering if the will be able to afford the next funeral.

The rich soil of this previously prosperous country is once again at the heart of its activities; at one time famous for its rich harvests and abundant food the soil is now providing the country’s blanket of death. The blanket needs to expand.

When I stayed with a friend in a residential area of Bulawayo last August, there was no water. Fifteen months later, there is still no water in their home. In many parts of Zimbabwe there is no water. According to a source yesterday, the government utilities turned off water when it ran out of money for treatment chemicals. Shovels have become as familiar an item as walking sticks as desperate families search the ground until they find water. People fill pots and pans, as they drink from this untreated sewage water.

In addition to the AIDS epidemic, the mass starvation and increase of rape and abuse, Cholera has reared its’ head. Still, nothing is done by the rest of the world.

The situation in Zimbabwe is desperate. Most world news this weekend discussed President Mugabe’s refusal to let a humanitarian team in the country. This team included former United States President, Jimmy Carter and former head of the United Nations, Kofi Anon and human rights activist, Graca Machel, who is also Nelson Mandela’s wife. This was a diversion. So much more needs to be done immediately. If I hear one more President or Chancellor talk about the illegitimate regime or make a statement, I am going to scream.

The United Nations and The Red Cross push into war torn countries like Rwanda and the Congo, yet Zimbabwe is left on its own. True, there is not a typical war in this country, but there is systematic genocide. Isn’t that a situation worth the world community’s response?

The country has virtually shut down. Many schools, stores and government offices are closed. Last I read, inflation hovered somewhere near 230 million percent. Zimbabwean currency has been abandoned and replaced by the American Dollar.

Last week a group of men who supported the opposition party disappeared in the dark of night from their homes. The locals know these men will never be seen alive again. Families are separating out of desperation, traveling to other parts of Africa or globally, so they can send money back to family stranded in Zimbabwe. These people are the lucky ones. The families who have never traveled outside of Zimbabwe are the ones dying. They have no alternative.

Rapes have doubled, if not tripled. The women who had been raped by the youth militia are nowhere to be found. There is no medical treatment available, so most of these women are developing full blown AIDS. HIV/AIDS treatment medication is inaccessible; there is not a single hospital or clinic with its doors open.

A woman pregnant in Zimbabwe right now, is anything but joyful; most are certain to die. If a woman is unlucky enough to be in need of a caesarean for birth, she has two choices. She must pay the $400 dollars to get this procedure done, or her family creates a vigil as she dies. Death in these cases is almost imminent.

In the LA Times on Friday, Robyn Dixon interviewed a member of the Central Intelligence office, the CIA of Zimbabwe.

The CIO agent speaking anonymously and “Estimates that 60% to 70% of CIO officers — all but the hard-line ideologues — no longer back Mugabe.” Even with Mugabe’s support deteriorating it is not likely to change the outcome in Zimbabwe. Conformity is a prerequisite to those in Mugabe’s regime. No matter what your personal feelings, conform or risk death. This is why change cannot happen from inside Zimbabwe.

My friend recently pleaded with her husband to get their three children to a neighboring country. All their friends beg for food as they watch their children starve to death. Some of the Zimbabweans have had to bring food in by bus to feed their families. They cannot bring in enough food to feed everyone. She has struggled to help many to stay alive, but her life has been threatened, so she is now in hiding. Her husband drove all night to visit with her. She almost did not recognize him as he drove up; he had not had a bath in months. His skin was very dry and much darker than she remembered. He smelled as if he had “all the sewage of Gaborone on him”, she said.

I often wonder if the rumor of Mugabe’s Syphilis is true — has this disease ravaged this man’s mind or do I use that as an excuse? ” It is hard for me to imagine a man turned so rotten from the inside out. His thirst for power and insatiable greed has destroyed this incredible country. Perhaps we can learn from the destruction of Zimbabwe that the actions of power and greed can destroy us all.

(The Haffington Post)

By Dave Harcourt

Ashenafi Chote, of the Wolaytta district south of Addis Ababa, says that he regrets converting his land from food crops to caster seeds for biodiesel. He is now dependent on Food Aid and can no longer generate income from his land. CastorThe company that got him into this situation admit they have been unable to pay him, as agreed, because a loan they expected hasn’t come through!

The realisation that the cost of biofuel crops grown in temperate climates is too high to support a viable biodiesel industry has lead Europe to look elsewhere for cheaper raw materials. Africa, with its appropriate climate, soil fertility, and low labour costs can produce oil for biodiesel much more cheaply than Europe. Biofuels have been supported as a development path by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and other agencies of the United Nations (UN), with the proviso that projects are properly implemented to avoid any impact on food production or the environment. Unfortunately, unscrupulous companies can quite easily take advantage of desperate small farmers and naive governments, to drive unfair contracts.

As someone living in South Africa, with some experience of working in poor rural areas, the stories of wealth and benefits for small scale farmers entering the biofuels sector make little sense to me. The shear scale of the world’s biodiesel demand result in numbers which just don’t make sense. Ashenafi Chote, who opened this story normally produced 100 kg of maize, which indicates that he is farming, at most, 0.4 ha. With normal yields this would produce about 160 litres of biodiesel which would allow a medium sized MPV to travel some 2,500 km. Therefore, 10 farmers are needed to keep the MPV on the road for a year. If farmers are expected to only change a third of their land to castor, this means 3 million farmers are needed to produce just 1 % of the UKs biodiesel consumption. The logistics of it are just impossible, imagine millions of farmers wanting to deliver their crop and collect their few dollars at harvest time. So I believe all these projects are actually designed around large scale commercial production with the small farmer component used to put a “good spin” on the project.

Two posts on EcoWorldly Biofuels War: The New Scramble for Africa by Western Big Money Profiteers and Are Biofuels Another Inconvenient Truth? have given different but related views on the potential and implications of first generation biofuels. Scanning the news its clear that the publicity and optimism at the start of these projects is what everyone, especially biofuel companies and governments promote. They are slower to report the problems that often arise.

So back to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Government has encouraged biofuel projects as a means of reducing the drain on the economy of importing increasingly expensive crude oil. As a result several Jatropha and Castor Oil projects have been established. In early June 2006 Melis Teka, coordinator of biofuel development in the Ministry of Mines and Energy, told Reuters

There is no shortage of agriculture land in Ethiopia for food production. We have up to 23 million hectares which could be developed both for crops and biofuel. Biofuel plants are being developed on arid and barren land not suitable for food production.

At the end of March 2008 the Ethiopian Review reported that Global Energy Ethiopia (GEE), who operated one of the Government supported projects, expected their first batch of 28 000 tons of castor seeds in August/September 2008. The castor, equivalent to 12 000 tons of oil, would actually be grown by 25,000 families contracted by GEE and would have a value of around US$ 10 million.

Ashenafi Chote was one of the farmers contracted by GEE. He as well as the other farmers have not been paid for their production because, as Agence France-Presse  reports, GEE has been unable to raise the loan it was expecting to use to buy the castor. Ashenafi Chote is now in a very dangerous situation as he planted all his land with castor. He now has neither the food he normally grew for his family, nor the small income he generated by selling his excess production. GEE defends itself by saying it “did not allow” farmers to plant more than a third of their land to castor. However, it was GEE’s promises that moved farmers to invest everything in castor, from which they have to date gained no benefit. GEE’s actions show little understanding of poor people and the lives they struggle to live

A final interesting point is that planting a non food crop like castor or Jatropha (both contain toxins and are inedible) benefits the biodiesel refiner as it means that there is no market competition for the farmer’s production. For the farmer it limits their options, but more importantly, the crops can’t be eaten if the refiner doesn’t deliver as is the case in the above story.

My personal concern is that this is the type of project problem that will be repeated many times before the dust settles and Africa actually benefit from this opportunity.

By BASHIR ADIGUN

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — MTV launched its first-ever music award program for Africa on Saturday, with acts from across the world’s poorest continent nominated for prizes in the Nigerian capital.

Nigerian singer D’banj won the artist of the year award, while his compatriot, Naeto C, took the laurels for the best new African act, it was announced at the ceremony in Abuja.

Winners were selected by fans sending text messages, said Alison Reid, a spokeswoman for MTV Networks Africa.

Africa has long featured a vibrant music scene, but artists have had difficulties breaking into overseas markets. Famous African artists include Senegal’s Youssou N’dour, Nigerian legend Fela Kuti and South African impresario Miriam Makeba, who died this month.

MTV hopes the awards can offer the artists more exposure and celebrate the continent’s artistry.

Performers from South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Gabon and others also were nominated. Songs by D’banj and Naeto C, both male, are all but ubiquitous on the radio in Nigeria, Africa’s most-populous nation of 140 million people.

African music is highly varied, reflecting myriad tastes in the vast continent. Included across the many genres are call-and-response chanting and heavy drumming, drawing on pre-colonial modes of communication among villages.

Since independence movements swept the continent in the 1960s, African music also has increasingly been open to outside influence, incorporating salsa rhythms, rock beats and, increasingly, hip hop and R&B styles.

Many of the new Nigerian acts nominated Saturday feature heavy beats pioneered by American rappers and hip-hop artists. The lyrics often reflect the desire of many Nigerians to escape poverty and corrupt governance.

MTV’s regional music channel MTV Base now reaches almost 50 million African viewers in 48 countries through a network of pay-per-view services and partnerships with domestic channels.