Hunger: On the knife’s edge in Ethiopia
A changing climate and a large, fast-growing population threaten to undo some of the progress Ethiopia has made since the 1984 famine. In the crowded south, I met farmers with few cards to play in a real-life hunger game — and others who have more reason to hope.
(Originally published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 12, 2012)
SHASHEMENE, Ethiopia
Abdala Wahilo finds relief from the midday sun under the corrugated metal roof of a warehouse in Shashemene, a town not far from the farm where he tries to support a family of 12 on a single hectare of land. Here, at this emergency food aid distribution centre, he also finds some relief from the hunger that his family has faced in the last few years as repeated droughts have ravaged this region in southern Ethiopia.
“We don’t want aid,” he says, waving at the wall of maize bags and plastic jugs of cooking oil that will provide basic rations to his family and more than 26,000 other people in the area. “We want to work and support ourselves.”
But without aid, his children eat at most twice a day and he and his wife only once, so Abdala says he’s thankful for the help. And he’s seen what happens without it: Last year, when the worst drought in decades hit, so many people in this area became malnourished that feeding centres were set up for children and pregnant women. To survive the past few years, he also had to sell most of his livestock, which had produced milk and butter he sold to raise money for food and school fees. Some of his children had to suspend their studies.
A vortex of population growth, land scarcity and a changing climate has wrenched Shashemene and much of densely populated south-central Ethiopia from an area that produced food surpluses less than a decade ago to a place where food aid is regularly needed. But the country as a whole has made steady progress in reducing poverty and blunting the impact of droughts since the devastating famine of 1984. And, at eight per cent, it has one of the highest economic growth rates in Africa, if not the world.
Still, there’s much more to do. After all, Ethiopia ranks 174th of 187 on the UN’s human development index, which measures income, education and life expectancy. It’s one of the world’s top aid recipients, and around a tenth of its people, like Abdala, needs some kind of food assistance each year.
Related: Six ways Ethiopians fight hunger
Asked if getting a handout hurts his pride, Abdala pauses, then says: “I am happy because my children aren’t starving.”
And with that, he hoists a 50-kilogram bag of maize on his back and heads out of the warehouse, back into the dusty lot where hundreds of others await their ration, back into the hot February sun that he prays will give way soon to the spring rains.
THE ETHIOPIAN PARADOX
Ethiopia is a frustrating paradox to its many western aid donors, including Canada, which put more than $176 million into development projects here in 2011.
On the one hand, the repressive regime is often in the headlines for jailing members of opposition parties and journalists, or for allegedly relocating of tens of thousands of citizens to allow Chinese and Indian companies to set up massive commercial farms to produce export crops. On the other hand, many aid groups laud the government for a commitment to poverty reduction that is far greater than many African countries.
“In Ethiopia, you actually see a government — that’s committed to try and make a difference,” says Jim Cornelius, director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, an aid and development agency that’s worked in Ethiopia since the 1984 famine. “A lot of progress has been made in the country.”
The most obvious sign of progress is that droughts and other “shocks” like food price spikes no longer cause full-blown famines — there’s hunger, yes, but not death on the grand scale that burned itself into our collective consciousness in 1984. There’s now an early-warning system for food crises, and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program creates public works projects to help more than seven million chronically vulnerable people. From road repairs to terracing and replanting the country’s eroded hillsides, at-risk farmers work in exchange for food or the cash to buy it. (To avoid dependency on handouts, the Ethiopian government stipulates that, except in emergencies, food aid is never given without work in return.)
The paradox of repression and development stems from the same source: The regime’s almost total control over its citizens and the economy. From the control of land tenure — citizens cannot buy or sell land — to the distribution of seeds and fertilizer, the government reaches deeply into the lives of most Ethiopians. Once ruled by an emperor who controlled all the land, then by a highly centralized communist regime in the 1970s and ’80s, the country’s current government, led by longtime Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, models itself on the highly controlled state capitalism of China, its biggest trading partner.
Meles, heading to Camp David next week at U.S. President Barack Obama’s invitation, will be one of four African leaders discussing food security with G8 leaders. Although he’s reviled as a despot by his detractors, he gets a lot of slack from western donors and allies because he runs a safe and stable country amid the chaos of Somalia to the east and the warring Sudans to the west.
More than $3.5 billion U.S. in aid rolled into Ethiopia last year, but it’s buying less and less influence with the Meles regime, which plays geopolitics to its advantage.
“The weight of development aid in terms of influence on the Ethiopian government has been decreasing and has been on the wane for a number of years,” says Nicolas Moyer of the Humanitarian Coalition, a network of five major Canadian aid and development agencies that works in Ethiopia and around the world. “The increasing presence of Chinese investments on the private sector side has largely decreased the influence of the development donors on the Ethiopian government’s thinking and strategy.”
WHERE ARE THE TRUCKS?
The Ethiopian government may hold most of the cards in controlling the country’s destiny, but with it comes the responsibility of feeding 90 million people.
Driving south from Addis Ababa to the country’s most densely populated areas, that challenge comes into sharp focus.
The smooth, black highway that cuts through the dry season’s palette of dusty browns and beiges is lined with Ethiopians on foot, carrying water in bright yellow jerry cans or driving heavily laden carts pulled by stoic donkeys. What’s missing here? Trucks carrying goods and raw materials, the stuff of commerce. That, says Cornelius, shows how little economic activity there is here beyond farming. Not only does this limit Ethiopians’ ability to work off the farm for extra income in bad times, he says, it limits their diet to what they can grow themselves since many can’t afford to buy other types of food. And in the big picture, it means that as the population grows and everyone’s parcel of land gets smaller, there isn’t enough opportunity for farmers, much less their children.
“We have to do something about moving people from the land to livelihoods that may still be related to an agrarian economy,” says Foodgrains Bank field representative Sam Vander Ende, who’s lived in Ethiopia for more than 18 years. “But the peasant livelihood isn’t going to get us there.”
The highway winds past a vast greenhouse complex, more than two kilometres long in all, where up to 10,000 day labourers are employed growing roses for European markets. It’s evidence of the government’s recent, and controversial, push for large scale commercial agriculture that brings in much needed foreign currency.
Still, the vast majority of people remain on the land. The poorest families in southcentral Ethiopia subsist on less than a hectare of land — many on much, much less.
Thomas Tora, a farmer in the Damot Woyde area, has only an eighth of a hectare (about the size of an NHL hockey rink) on which to support his family of six. Even in a good year, that’s not enough to feed everyone. Last year’s drought left his children malnourished to the point that they couldn’t stand up, he says, much less go to school — which he couldn’t afford anyway. He left his village to gather wood to sell in an effort to make ends meet. Eventually the Foodgrains Bank and its local partners set up a relief program, and a government food-for-work program also assisted him and thousands of nearby villagers in the same situation.
Asked if he would move to an area with more or better land, Thomas, shakes his head under a tattered ball cap. “I am too weak to go,” he says, explaining that he has health problems. But among his neighbours there’s wary enthusiasm for resettlement.
“Everyone would be willing to go,” says Zewdie Zebdewos, the chairman of the local township where Thomas lives. “But they are worried about the land and about malaria.” Many people here live higher up in the hills where malaria can’t stalk their children or their livestock. Arable land in low-lying areas often goes unfarmed.
Resettlement of any kind, large or small, is a hot button topic. Beyond the current controversy over accusations of forced resettlements, memories of the former communist regime’s disastrous mass relocations are as close as the tractors rusting on abandoned collective farms. Canada — and many other western donors — won’t fund anything tied to resettlement efforts or commercial farming.
But there is a recognition that something has to be done to deal with the scarcity of land in densely populated places if Ethiopia is to become self-sufficient.
“The country does need to be looking at how it can develop its land, and it should be making land available to those who don’t have lands,” says Cornelius of the Foodgrains Bank. “The critical thing is that it’s voluntary and there does need to be accompanying services provided to make it viable.”
Too often, he says, people have been resettled to areas with insufficient roads, schools and health care.
With land tenure firmly in the government’s control, migration to cities has also been held firmly in check, observes the Humanitarian Coalition’s Moyer, who lived in Ethiopia for three years.
The government prefers slow urbanization, he says, because it wants to avoid the experience of other developing countries where migration spawned slums, dire poverty and crime.
With such limited mobility, Ethiopians have few options.
“You have a huge, burgeoning population of people who don’t feel they have any control over their destiny,” observes Vander Ende. “It’s in the hands of God, it’s in the hands of the federal government, it’s in the hands of the local government — it’s in the hands of (aid agencies like) Canadian Foodgrains Bank.”
“Ethiopia struggles with promoting small-scale and community-led develop-ment where Ethiopians could set up small businesses, improve their farming practices and be part of the solutions themselves,” says Moyer. “Ethiopians don’t feel part of the solution. The state has always been the source of their livelihood.”
A SUCCESS STORY
A few hours’ drive from Shashemene’s travails, the farmers in a small township in the Kutcha district do feel part of the solution to chronic food shortages.
In fact, they no longer need food aid.
The villagers in Dana resettled here voluntarily in the dying days of the communist era, three ethnic groups speaking three languages, tossed together in a forest of snakes, the occasional lion, and no services. Life was very tough: clearing land, eking out a living from nothing. It’s reminiscent of the hardships faced by the settlers of the Canadian West, observes Cornelius, who runs the Foodgrains Bank from Winnipeg. Its biggest supporters are the farmers who work the Prairies today, people who know something about the vagaries of weather and working the land.
Today, Dana is a different place.
Cellphone in hand, farmer Oych Yaya walks along a ditch that catches water from a nearby river, hops up onto the edge of a concrete trough, and follows it to the other end, where the water flows into his own patch of insurance against unpredictable rains: One-quarter hectare of irrigated land that all but guarantees at least two good crops a year.
More than 230 of his neighbours got the same opportunity three years ago when they dug the channels for this water diversion project funded by the Foodgrains Bank.
Today, Oych is earning cash for the first time by selling surplus crops such as onions, peppers and bananas. He can now afford to pay fees and boarding costs so his seven children can go to school in Selamber, the district town. For years, their education was interrupted whenever droughts made paying fees impossible. His cellphone helps him track prices in nearby market towns so he can get good prices for his crops.
While aid agencies and the government take on similar irrigation projects and promote more productive ways of farming around the country, development experts say Ethiopia is not making the most of its land. According to government statistics, 740,000 of its 1.2 million square kilometres is arable, but only 150,000 square kilometres is being cultivated.
“The agricultural potential is there,” says Moyer. Despite being home to the source of the Nile and being the ‘water tower of Africa,’ he adds, only a small percentage of the arable land is irrigated. And because farmers do not have tenure over the land and plots are rotated between them every few years, he says, they don’t invest as much as they could in the land. “Everybody knows they won’t have the same land 10 years from now, so there’s a lot less investment in terms of how to maximize the use of the land.”
SURVIVING IN LEAN TIMES
In the meantime, Ethiopians find ways to survive lean periods.
“People have been facing hunger for centuries, for generations,” says Vander Ende. “And one thing that Ethiopians excel in is survival skills. They know what to do.” While aid is sometimes needed, he says, it’s “at best only a supplement” to generations old coping strategies and survival skills.
These include planting “famine crops” such as enset — often called false banana due to its appearance — whose roots can be eaten when other crops fail. In good times, families build up assets such as livestock, which can be sold in lean times.
Local development agencies are also building on the strong tradition of villagers banding together to help one another by encouraging women, who often have little say in community affairs, create selfhelp groups of their own. Since 2008, the women of the village of Sere Belaka have been meeting weekly under the shade of a grove of trees overlooking a spectacular valley, each taking her turn to lead the group. Each week, each member contributes one birr (about five cents) to the group. The women, all illiterate and most living on half-hectare farms, explain that the idea of pooling their savings was a revelation that has made a sizable change in their lives. The women have used the money to buy sheep and resell them at higher prices, fatten up and butcher an ox to sell, and stockpile maize until prices rise. With their earnings, they helped one mother get medical help for her son who’d broken his arm, contributed to church and home construction and invested in members’ micro-businesses such as bee-keeping. And it sure beats going to the moneylenders. As one woman explained, being able to pay school fees was the best insurance of all: The women want their children to get an education, get good jobs and be able to take care of them in their old age.
“No matter what community you’re in, parents want their kids to be in school,” says Moyer. “They are limited in their options in subsistence agriculture. Most, if not all, see the way out through education.”
THE CLIMATE CHANGE FACTOR
In Shashemene, the rains Abdala Wahilo prayed for in February didn’t come — at least not in time. And by the time any moisture hit the ground in late April it was too late for most farmers like him, who count on the “short rains” for crops that will feed them until the major crops are harvested.
“The short rainy season has effectively been a writeoff,” reports Vander Ende, noting that the season’s crops provide crucial food during the “hunger gap” between the main growing seasons. In recent weeks rains have come to some areas, and Vander Ende says that may help some farmers prepare ground for planting crops in June.
“We’re on a knife-edge here,” he says, “seeing if we can salvage something from this very, very late rain.”
There’s not much they or anyone else can do about the weather, not even the ever-present Ethiopian government. And the forecast is worrisome.
FEWSNET, a famine early warning system funded by USAID, released two reports in April that don’t bode well for the people of south-central Ethiopia, where so much of the population lives.
In the Wolayta area, not far from Shashemene, FEWSNET reported that the sweet potato harvest was a “near complete failure,” food prices were rising, as were admissions of severely malnourished children to feeding programs and “stabilization centres.”
“Increased sale of livestock and firewood, consumption of immature enset and migration to towns in search of labour are being reported by poor households,” the report says. “Given such outcomes, thousands of poor and very poor households in these parts of the region are currently experiencing a food security crisis.”
The second report looked at the longterm climate trend. For many areas of the country, FEWSNET says, the outlook is good, with rainfall expected to keep farms productive. That, it says, is likely going to be needed to offset the problems facing south central Ethiopia where farmers like Abdala and the women of Sere Belaka can expect a drier future. The report concludes:
• Rains in this part of Ethiopia have de-creased 15 to 20 per cent since the mid 1970s.
• Rising temperatures are making dry con-ditions even worse.
• The drop in rainfall is happening in the country’s most populated and fast-growing areas, creating conditions that “could dramatically increase the number of atrisk people in Ethiopia during the next 20 years.”
Whether it’s called climate change or not, says Moyer, the reality on the ground looks the same to the people living there.
“Whereas these regions may have seen severe droughts every five years and catastrophic ones every 10 years, we’re seeing them sometimes back-to-back,” he says. “If you’re going to face two months of severe drought and a potential famine situation where you can’t access food, if you have to sell off your livestock or your key household assets, you’re going to be worse off for a long period and may be even less equipped to deal with the next crisis that comes.”
‘WE HAVE BAND-AIDS FOR A VERY GOOD REASON’
For Cornelius, that’s where relief comes in. And go ahead, he says, call it a Bandaid solution.
“We have Band-aids for a very good reason,” he says. “We need to cover wounds so they don’t get infected and lead to bigger problems. If you don’t provide relief and the family takes their kids out of school, that’s compromising the future.”
For many Ethiopians, the future is measured by the next meal, the next crop, the next rainfall. The longer term solutions, are, for the most part, out of their workweary hands.
Carl Neustaedter travelled in Ethiopia in 2012 on a food study tour organized and funded by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.
ETHIOPIA BY THE NUMBERS
174: Rank out of 187 on the UN Human Development Index.
6: Canada’s rank
58: Life expectancy. In Canada: 81
30%: Ethiopia’s literacy rate
90 million: Population in 2011
4.5 million: Number who received food aid in 2011 after a severe drought
7.4 million: Number assisted by Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program
43%: Population age 14 and under
-20%: Decline in rainfall since the 1970s in parts of south-central Ethiopia, its most densely populated area
$971: Annual income per capita in Ethiopia ($US). Canada’s is $35,166 ($US)
$176.7 million: Canada’s development aid to Ethiopia in 2010–11
14: Percentage of Ethiopia’s gross national income that comes from foreign aid
2015: Year the Ethiopian government wants to be free of foreign food aid
Sources: CIDP, UN, World Bank, USAID/FEWSNET, CIA, CIDA
