By Beth D. MSc AEES (Advanced Enviornmental & Energy Studies)
Coffee, animal production, cotton, cut flowers, etc are water thirsty crops. A 1 kilo jar of coffee uses 20,000 ltrs or 20 tonnes of water to produce it. Coffee is a major Ethiopian export, yet Ethiopia cannot access water from the Blue Nile for irrigation as Egypt has agreements put in place during the British involvement in that area allowing it use of all of the Blue Nile extractions.
When we eat Jaffa oranges from Israel, we are taking water out of an extremely water stressed region and most likely out of the river Jordan. The country Jordan cannot access this water anymore due to Israel’s use of the entire river flow.
Some countries have to import food as their water sources are insufficient to grow food for their populations. However, many other countries do not need to import, yet they still rely on poorer water-stressed regions to provide food for them.
America exports a great deal of water in the form of grain and beef. It is thought that enough water to float a battleship is needed to grow a 1000 lb steer. It takes 1000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of wheat. The water-stressed states should be looking further than domestic and industrial use if real progress is to be made on water conservation.
Flood irrigation needs to be stopped and trickle-drip or spot irrigation procedures need to be adopted. Furthermore, the idea of “making the desert bloom” by installing dams and irrigation channels needs to be put on the shelf. When we divert water away from its natural routes, we deprive one healthy eco-system in order to create two stressed eco-systems. Neither one has adequate supplies to sustain a bio-diverse enviornment.
And then there is rainwater harvesting, stopping deforestation, wetland conservancy… all these things create healthier rivers, groundwater systems and feed into lakes.
(Blacktown Sun) ASSEFA Bekele is an extraordinary man. The 59-year-old grandfather-of-two came to Australia 20 years ago with his wife and two daughters, then 6 and 16, with no English but big dreams of a better life.
Assefa Bekele
“It was very, very difficult,” he said. “I cried on the plane because I had these three lives in my hands. I thought, `Where am I taking my family? Have I made the right decision?”’
Mr Bekele left Ethiopia after receiving a scholarship to study metalogical engineering at the Technical University of Athens.
He described his family’s arrival in Australia as “dark times”.
“When I first arrived I immediately looked for Ethiopian-speaking services to help us but I was told none existed,” he said.
“Lucky for us, I could speak Greek also, so I asked for Greek services and was pointed in the direction of many helpful facilities.”
After finding temporary accommodation, Mr Bekele looked for employment in the engineering profession but was unsuccessful.
He set up home in St Clair in Sydney’s west and took up work as a security guard.
He combined that with volunteer work as a first aid officer with St John’s Ambulance service and NSW police in 1996. But it was his work as a volunteer language specialist, security and customer service officer at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 that he considers “one of my best life experiences”.
“It was absolutely amazing to see all people come together regardless of colour, religion or country,” he said.
With his two daughters now grown up, one married with two children and the other studying a Masters degree in health science, Mr Bekele feels it is vital to tell his story to help others achieve success.
“You need to be very determined but it’s important for migrants to know there are many people who have succeeded,” he said.
As part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Mr Bekele will be taking part in a writing workshop on May 24 at Blacktown Arts Centre, titled Voices from the Australia-African Communities of Western Sydney.
His monologue, “Please explain?,” tells the story of his life.
On Saturday, May 24, at 3.30pm, Blacktown Arts Centre will also hold a workshop by critically acclaimed theatre writer Pascal Daantos Berry titled New Philippine Australian Writing.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — An [kangaroo] Ethiopian court sentenced to death eight alleged members of a separatist rebel group for an attack last year which left six people dead, officials told AFP Thursday.
“The Somali State High Court sentenced eight culprits to death for killing and wounding innocent people,” the official Ethiopian News Agency reported.
Six people were killed and more than 40 others wounded on May 28 last year when grenades were hurled into a stadium where some 100,000 people were gathered for a national celebration.
Police responded to the attack by firing in the air. Several of the victims died in the ensuing chaos.
The court also found the accused guilty of attempting to assassinate Abdullahi Hassen, a senior official for Ethiopia’s mainly ethnic Somali Ogaden region.
“The eight individuals are members of the ONLF,” local security chief Abdi Ile told AFP, charging that they were “trained by the Eritrean government for five years.”
The Ogaden National Liberation Front, formed in 1984, is fighting for the independence of ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia’s vast oil-rich Ogaden region, whom they say have been marginalized by the Tigrean People Liberation Front’s regime.
The eight can yet appeal the decision.
The Ethiopian Woyanne army launched a crackdown in Ogaden after ONLF rebels attacked a Chinese oil venture in April 2007 that left 77 people dead.
A bomb went off on Tuesday near the foreign ministry in Addis Ababa, killing six people and wounding seven. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
MOGADISHU (Garowe Online) – Senior members of Mogadishu’ s municipal government have raised serious accusations against Mayor Mohamed “Dheere” Omar, a former warlord who enjoys intimate ties with the Ethiopian government.
Mohamed Dhagahtur, the deputy mayor for social affairs, and Abdifatah Shaweye, who is deputy mayor in charge of security, issued the joint statement to the press Wednesday in the Somali capital.
Both deputy mayors launched scathing accusations linking Mayor Mohamed Dheere to the ongoing insurgency that has virtually crippled Somalia’s transitional government since early 2007.
“We have informed [transitional] Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf at Villa Somalia [presidential compound] and he [President Yusuf] has accepted all our messages regarding insecurity in the Somali capital and the role of Mogadishu Mayor Mohamed Dheere,” Mr. Dhagahtur told journalists today.
The deputy mayors accused Mohamed Dheere of aiding insurgents by providing them weapons, while specifically linking the mayor of Mogadishu to a guerrilla attack on a key checkpoint south of the capital yesterday that killed three government soldiers.
Also today, the deputy mayors co-chaired a meeting with 13 district commissioners from across Mogadishu, where they informed the commissioners that President Yusuf has pledged to “change” the current Mogadishu government.
Mayor Mohamed Dheere has not responded publicly to any of these accusations, but observers are quick to point that he enjoys the backing of Ethiopia’s Woyanne army generals deployed in Mogadishu.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It seems that AP, BBC, Reuters, CNN and other media assign their dumbest reporters to Africa. These reporters only parrot the lines given to them by Africa’s dictators. In reporting about the current famine in Ethiopia, they continue to give lack of rain as the only cause, but the fact is that Ethiopia has too many unutilized rivers. Some of them are now being used to grow flowers for export to Europe by companies affiliated with the ruling Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne). It’s estimated that these Woyanne-affiliated irrigation farms will export $186 million worth of flowers this year (see here). These flower farms are not affected by the ‘lack of rain.’ Another example: There is scarce rain in Egypt, but it uses the Nile river, which originates in Ethiopia, to grow all of its food. There is no famine in Egypt, a country that totally depends on Ethiopia’s river for its supply of fresh water. The cause of starvation in Ethiopia is not lack of rain. It is mismanagement of the country’s resources by the U.S./IMF/WorldBank-backed tribal junta.
Starvation claiming Ethiopia’s tiniest
SHANTO, Ethiopia (AP) — The rangy 3-year-old weighs less than 10 pounds, or 4 kilograms. Her long limbs, weak and folded like a praying mantis, cannot carry even her slight weight. She cannot speak. She doesn’t want to eat. Health officials say she is permanently stunted.
Bizunesh — whose name, sadly, means “plentiful” — is one of untold numbers of children hit by this year’s double blow of a countrywide drought and skyrocketing global food prices that has brought famine, once again, to Ethiopia.
“She should be bigger than this,” said her mother Zewdunesh Feltam, rocking the listless child. “Before there was maize, different kinds of food. But now there is nothing … I beg for milk from my neighbors.”
The U.N. children’s agency said in a statement Tuesday an estimated 126,000 Ethiopian children urgently need food and medical care because of severe malnutrition — and called the crisis “the worst since the major humanitarian crisis of 2003.”
The U.N. World Food Program estimates that 2.7 million Ethiopians will need emergency food aid because of late rains — nearly double the number who needed help last year. An additional 5 million of Ethiopia’s 80 million people receive aid each year because they never have enough food, whether harvests are good or not.
In Shanto, the crisis is vivid. A feeding center run by the Irish charity GOAL has admitted 73 starving children in the past month.
Some, like Bizunesh, are frail and skeletal. Others, like 4-year-old Eyob Tadesse, have grossly swollen limbs in a sign of extreme malnutrition.
Eyob, whose mother said he used to be a lively, talkative child, sat in a stupor, unable to speak, not moving even to brush away the flies that swarmed all over his face. The sunny room humid with a recent, too late, rain shower was made gloomy by an eerie silence despite being full of sick children. Chronic malnutrition can affect children for life, stunting their growth, brain development and immune systems, which leaves them vulnerable to a host of illnesses.
Many mothers said their families were trying to survive on a gluey, chewy bread made of the root of the “false banana” plant — one of many wild or so-called famine foods that Ethiopians depend on in times of trouble.
It’s not known how many children have died or are starving now. Local and international aid and health workers say between 10 and nearly 20 percent of Ethiopia’s children are malnourished — 15 percent is considered a critical situation. In 2006, Ethiopia had 13.4 million children under the age of five, according to UNICEF.
In Shanto, a southwestern agricultural area that grows sweet potatoes, recent rains arrived too late to save the harvest.
Samuel Akale, a nutritionist with the government’s disaster prevention agency, said the hunger will get worse. “The number of severely malnourished will increase, and then they’ll die.”
WFP officials say the drought has affected six of Ethiopia’s nine regions, stretching from Tigray in the north to the vast and dry Somali region in the south, though not every part of every region is affected.
Spokesman Greg Beals said the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is preparing an appeal for additional tens of millions of dollars.
“This is a real crisis that needs to be addressed,” he said.
Ethiopia is a country with a history of hunger. It escalated to notoriety in 1984 when a famine compounded by communist policies killed some 1 million people. Pictures of stick-thin children like Bizunesh were broadcast onto television sets around the world.
This year’s crisis is mild in comparison. But drought and chronic hunger persist in Ethiopia, a Horn of Africa nation known for its coffee, a major export. In 2003, droughts led 13.2 million people to seek emergency food aid. Drought in 2000 left more than 10 million needing emergency food.
Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land, and agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and 85 percent of exports. But many also go hungry because of government policies. Ethiopia’s government buys all crops from farmers at fixed low prices. And the government owns all the land, so it cannot be used as collateral for loans.
Aid agencies say emergency intervention is not enough and are appealing for more money to support regular feeding programs.
“What we’re doing at the moment is waiting until children get severely malnourished, taking them into the feeding program, getting them back to a level of moderate malnutrition and then watching them cycle back,” said Hatty Newhouse, a nutrition adviser from GOAL.
There are fears that the next harvest also will fail.
“We are crying with the mothers and the children,” said Akale, the nutritionist.
