Counting mouths, counting months

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Cairo Times, Egypt, 04-05-2000

Donor fatigue and mutual mistrust have delayed the response to the latest famine in the Horn of Africa, but we won't know for several months whether the help has come too late. Martin Stolk reports from Legambo, Ethiopia.

More than three thousand Ethiopians are gathered on a field outside the village of Legambo in the north Ethiopian region of Wollo. It is the last day of the five-day monthly distribution period for emergency food aid. The people become a little agitated while several hundred bags of wheat are carried outside. The grounds are a whirlpool of colorfully dressed people. Older men and women wait quietly, while some overly enthusiastic children are kept under control by the village militia. Some families have by now walked 15 kilometers from their village and will have to return today with their monthly ration of 12.5 kilos grain per person. It is not enough. Other women and children are already in the hills gathering edible wild plants. The side of the road towards the village is littered with the sun bleached bones of the cattle that died last year.

Drought has once again hit the Horn of Africa and famine alomst inevitable follows in its wake. According to estimates of the United States Agency for International Development and the United Nations some thirteen million people in the region are threatened with serious food deficiencies. In Ethiopia alone there are around eight million potential victims. Almost daily the numbers are adjusted upwards. But even the most conservative estimates picture a horror potentially worse than the infamous Ethiopian famine of 1984.

Aid organisations and the international media circus have descended en masse on the village Gode in south-east Ethiopia. For the assembled world press here are the best images - news channels all over the world have shown the picture of the same group of three dozen dead Gode cattle - of which the international aid community are making effective fundraising use. Food aid for this region has gained momentum. The International Red Cross air lifts nutritional supplements twice daily from Nairobi.

Bags of wheat are carried out and laid in line for distribution to  the needy  Photo by Martin Stolk

According to the aid organisations, the aid effort is still more a case of averting the famine than of treating its victims. But in some spots the young and elderly have begun to die. "Sometimes I am afraid to visit the villages," says Kassahun Bishaw, the British Save the Children's regional aid coordinator for the provinces of Wollo and Tigray: "It is my day to day activity to lighten the suffering, but I almost do not want to see it anymore." While the need in the south east Ethiopian Somali Ogaden is the most visible and publicised, over most of Ethiopia one can find pockets with a high food insecurity. Nevertheless, the biggest number of victims - almost seven million - live in Kassahun's region - the traditional hunger belt in the north.

The Ethiopian Government in January requested $200 million dollars in food aid for the year 2000. But not until April did the pledges start coming in. Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin has accused the international donor community of only reacting when 'the skeletons appear on their television screens'. According to him the international community was the one to blame for the imminent famine. Having set up the Emergency Food Reserve some three years back, Ethiopia says donors who had borrowed food from the reserve had failed to replenish the borrowed grain. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan however reacted by saying that Ethiopia should not spend their precious resources on the war effort with Eritrea (see related story).

Unlike earlier famines in the Horn or in neighboring Sudan - almost enitirely man-made - the latest famine is largely due to three years of drought. But there are, as always, underlying factors. In the densely populated provinces of Wollo and Tigray the population pressure on the land is simply too high. The farmers' small land holdings cannot support them and their families. With the drought their capacity of coping with the food shortages has been exhausted. For the pastoral nomads the case is slightly different. They hold cattle that when sold to the Gulf countries can bring them an enormous profit. But this cattle is not very well adjusted to drought. For them it is a gamble which when rains fail can turn nasty, and can cause them to starve with their cattle.

Another major problem however lies with the current Ethiopian government itself. Dominated by former Tigrayan rebels, President Zenawi's ruling party has invested most of the country's income and development money in their own northern province. While here new buildings and industries mushroomed, the rest of the country quite often missed out. One obvious candidate for an infrastructure project, which has never been carried out, would be a sewage treatment plant on the Wabi Shebelle river, which flows through the south-east famine zone. Even at the height of the drought, the nomads won't water their cattle in it because it is too polluted.

The West claims that Ethiopia is exaggerating the famine. Donors still have a vivid memory of the misappropriation of food and money by Ethiopia's former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. The dictator used famine as a weapon in his war against the Tigray and Eritrean rebels. Aid money went to buy guns; food went to feed the army. This missappropriation was the main reason around 800.000 people starved to death in 1984. No wonder the aid community is cautious. Locals, on the other hand, say that the government has actually deliberately underestimated the amount of food it will need. Local officials in Legambo say they estimated that, out of 156,000 inhabitants in the area, 121,900 would need emergency aid. Provincial officials scaled the number down to 82,850. Moreover, no family is allowed to claim for more than five members - a de facto punishment for those who disregard the regime's family planning campaigns.

The government's figure of eight million people "threatened" by the famine does not mean that eight million will die if they aren't fed. Adults can live a long time on roots and leaves, past experiences have shown, although children cannot. On the ground however reliefworkers bristle when they are questioned about their figures. As Mesfin Tayele of the Ethiopian Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission (DPPC) puts it, "We are not here to support the government, but to help the people."

By now most of the requested $200 million food aid has been pledged. Now Ethiopians must wait for the food to arrive. That can take six months, too late for most famine victims. Current food aid reserves run out at the beginning of June. As the aid organisations said, it is not too late to act, but whether the effort will be sufficient will only become clear at the beginning of the summer.