Six ways to fight hunger in Ethiopia
(Originally published in the Ottawa Citizen, May 12, 2012)
Related: Hunger — On the knife’s edge in Ethiopia
More than four in five Ethiopians live in rural areas and are totally dependent on agriculture for their survival. Long-accustomed to experiencing periodic droughts, Ethiopians traditionally use good years to build up assets and reserves to use in lean times. Think of it as do-it-yourself insurance. But when droughts, late rains or other climatic conditions come more frequently — as they have in the last decade — farmers find their ability to cope diminished or even extinguished altogether. Here are five ways, new and old, that they get through tough times.
1. Plant ‘false banana’
Officially called ‘’enset,’’ this drought-resistant plant that looks similar to a banana tree takes four or five years to mature. Planted widely in southern Ethiopia for centuries as a hedge against other crop failures, each edible enset root can generate up to 40 kilograms of starchy food called ‘kocho.’ When droughts come more frequently than its growing period, farmers lose this ‘’famine food’’ as an alternative. Disease has also taken its toll on crop levels. Other crops used to fill the ‘’hunger gap’’ between larger harvests are sweet potato and haricot beans.
2. Buy livestock
Any livestock a farm family can acquire in good years becomes insurance against lean years. Cattle and goats produce dairy products that can be sold for money for household expenses, school fees, taxes, and — if anything is left — savings. And when crops fail completely, animals can be sold outright for cash to buy food. If there aren’t enough good years between the bad, not enough livestock can be acquired to provide any insurance.
Bekelech Basa, a mother of six in the Selamber area in southern Ethiopia, received a free goat four years ago from a local development agency supported by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. ‘’It was my access to survival in the last hungry time,’’ she says. All she had to do was give the goat’s first offspring back to the program so another family could benefit, too. Today, she has five goats and a pregnant cow and there are more than 325 goats in this ‘’revolving goat program.’’
‘’It’s like a family’s savings account,’’ says Jim Cornelius, the director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, as a group of curious children gather around Bekelech as she nervously answers questions from Canadian journalists. Indeed, Bekelech is starting to dream a little for her family. She wants to move up from her mud and thatch home to one with a metal roof, and wants her children to be able to continue school. Her 15-year-old daughter is only in Grade 4, which is not uncommon as children are often pulled out of school in tough times because their parents have no money for fees.
3. Create a business
Grow, harvest and sell firewood from eucalyptus trees. Start a bee-keeping operation.
Or tap the tourist trade. Near Ethiopia’s premier historical site, the stunning 12th-century rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, several villages high on a plateau operate a trekking service for foreign tourists called TESFA. Each village on the route looks after guiding, lodging, cooking and carrying luggage on donkeys. Proceeds after wages are used communally for village needs such as taxes, interest-free loans for micro-businesses, buying and maintaining grain mills and creating savings funds for lean years.
4. Cheat the rain
In a country increasingly prone to food crises due to a changing climate and unpredictable rains, ensuring access to water is one of the best ways to assure a harvest. For Oych Yaya, a farmer in the hamlet of Dana, a water diversion project that now irrigates one of his plots of land means he has extra income for the first time. Resettled in the 1970s by the communist Derg regime to this former snake-infested area, Oych and his fellow villagers have eked out an existence on tiny plots of land, completely vulnerable to the rains. Based on the needs of each, just over half of the 400-plus families here received a small plot of land irrigated from a nearby river.
The Ethiopian government oversaw the project and the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada helped pay for it, but the people of the village did all the manual labour through a work-for-food program and contributing one day a week of unpaid labour. As a result, for the last three years — as drought has ravaged this area of southern Ethiopia — Oych and his neighbours have been able to grow a steady supply of maize, onions, ginger, peppers and banana. And now Oych can pay for his seven children to go to school again.
5. Pool, save, invest
Under the shade of trees, sitting on the ground or on low wooden benches, the women of a rural hamlet in the Selamber area gather once a week to share their money and their ideas for improving their lot. Each contributes a single birr (five cents) — one woman says she cuts down on milk and coffee in order to spare it — and the money is pooled to use as investments in micro-businesses, emergency medical funds and building projects.
The women, dressed in long skirts, some with head coverings and all with the ubiquitous plastic sandals, have made their first, tentative steps toward their big dream of having their own grinding wheel to mill their grain — and, one woman jokes, to open a supermarket one day.
Their weekly meetings are also a chance to do how-to sessions on better health, and to decide how to help the ill and needy in the community with cooking, cleaning and fetching water. And for most, this venue is their first and only place where their voice is heard in male-dominated community affairs.
6. Farm ‘God’s way’
Religion is deeply ingrained in Ethiopian life, whether through the dominant Christian population or the sizable Muslim minority that often live side by side. For the development arm of Ethiopia’s Kale Heywet Church, which runs aid and development programs for people of all religions here, faith provides an avenue for introducing improvements to farming techniques. They call it farming ‘’God’s way,’’ but it’s better known in the agricultural world as ‘’zero-till’’ or conservation farming. Outside a rural church in Dana, the pastor and the Kale Heywet church planted a small demonstration plot to show local farmers that they could increase their yields and reduce the need for expensive fertilizers by not plowing their fields after harvest and thus retaining valuable nutrients and soil. Will it work? With tiny plots of land and yields lost to environmental degradation, these leaders are counting on it to increase the amount of food each hectare can produce.
