PRESS DIGEST
Ethiopia faces new famine
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian (London),
February 17, 1998
FROM the air the highlands of Tigray look as beige as sand. The forests have disappeared from the mountainsides, cut down by farmers looking in increasingly marginal areas for land to plough. In the lowlands there is no water on the meandering riverbeds to catch the sun. The detail of disaster comes into full view on the ground. “In half of this area conditions are as bad as the great famine of 1985. In the other half they are only slightly better,” says Haile-Mariam Habtu, head of the regional council in Samre in southern Tigray. “About 80 percent of the district’s 97,000 people need food aid and so far only 13,000 have got it.”
In Mekele, the regional capital, senior officials of the Relief Society of Tigray confirm that Ethiopia’s harvest has been the worst since the military regime of the Derg collapsed in 1991. Experts from the United Nations World Food Program share that assessment.
Although they differ on the exact numbers in need, and for how long relief will be needed, both sides agree that Ethiopia requires a minimum of 420,000 tons of food for at least 5 million people in Tigray and the other northern regions. The huge food deficit comes two years after the government boasted that Ethiopia had reached self-sufficiency and celebrated by exporting grain to Kenya.
This year’s crisis is a reminder of how little agricultural irrigation there is and how much the 85 percent of the population which lives in the countryside depends on rain.
“1996 was a climatic fluke. There were perfect rains in the right places in the right amounts at the right times,” says Jim Borton of the United Nations Emergencies Unit for Ethiopia. “To talk of self-sufficiency was somewhat premature.”
Last year there was little rain in the main growing period in July and August and an unexpected wet spell during harvest time in November. Rains can knock down the standing corn and shatter the kernels, or make the harvested corn germinate and develop fungal infection.
The United States and the European Union have pledged 205,000 tons so far.
Although officials in Tigray admit that this year’s looming crisis has already created some “distress migration,” they are trying to direct aid to the neediest in the villages where they live.
Tigray was the heartland of the armed struggle against the Derg. The Tigrean People’s Liberation Front, on which the government in Addis Abeba is based, developed a powerful grass-roots organization during 13 years of war. Its district committees, known as baitos, draw up lists of beneficiaries in the most vulnerable categories. But aid agencies wonder whether distribution will be as efficient elsewhere.
Foreign donors applaud the government for its investments in agriculture since 1991, ranging from rural credit schemes to the building of earth dams to catch the rain. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s support for the reduction of subsidies on fertilizer prices has led farmers to cut back on their use.
The main point of conflict between the government and donors concerns its refusal to abolish the constitutional provision which makes land the property of the state. Donors claim that without private ownership peasants cannot obtain mortgages to develop farms or sell up and go into urban businesses.
But Prime Minister Meles Zenawi says: “If peasants sell, they might desert the land and descend on the towns in their hundreds and thousands. There is no chance of creating enough urban jobs so the best thing is to find income generation in the countryside.”
Some experts accuse the government and foreign donors of complacency in the face of a “time-bomb,” even if this year’s crisis is contained. The country has twice as many people as in 1985 and the population is growing at more than 3 percent a year, while land-holdings diminish in size to the point where fewer and fewer farmers can feed their families even in a good year. At some point there will be catastrophe.
“The highland areas are still unbelievably inaccessible,” says Ben Foot of the Save the Children Fund. “The government and the donor community want everything to be positive, but it’s hiding a reality which will hit them from behind.” Even this year, he says, “beside the 5 million the government accepts are in need, there are another 5 million on the edge.”
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