Lutheran World Relief President Highlights Ethiopia Drought in TIME Essay
In an essay published in TIME online, Lutheran World Relief president Daniel Speckhard warns that the drought in Ethiopia, the worst the country has seen in 50 years, has to potential to “fall into an economic and political tailspin.”
In the piece, headlined How Ethiopia Can Overcome the Worst Drought in 50 Years, Speckhard notes that the East African nation has made tremendous progress, with an economic growth rate twice the regional average, that will likely avoid the widespread starvation of the famine in the mid-1980s. But this food and water crisis threatens the progress that has led some to call Ethiopia the Lion of Africa.
A built-in fragility still underlies Ethiopia and its government. Politically, the Ethiopian government has pursued its growth agenda while ruling at times with a strong fist. Anti-government protests have been met with violence. Restrictions on press freedom, including the imprisonment of bloggers, has chilled the media. And despite the impressive work by the U.S.-supported Productive Safety Net Program, which has helped make millions more resilient to shocks, about a third of the country still lives inpoverty, and many more people are one crisis away from destitution. Most of these are farming families scratching out a living on small, rain-fed plots of land.
This El Nino drought, if combined with an inadequate relief response and the pursuit of internal political agendas, could create the conditions for instability that would have catastrophic consequences locally and regionally. There is a temptation with everything else going on in the world to acquiesce to “compassion fatigue.” The international community cannot let this happen.
Speckhard calls for full funding by the international community of the $1.2 billion the United Nations says will be necessary for an effective emergency response. And he urged the humanitarian community to take a longer-range view of responding to disasters and other emergencies, noting that climate change and political unrest is triggering multiple simultaneous, pan-regional crises.
The international community must rethink its funding mechanisms and develop a system that makes resources available before disaster strikes, allowing for more rapid and nimble responses and perhaps even averting large-scale crises before they evolve. New innovative tools, such as micro-insurance, need to be more fully developed and broadly available to small-scale farmers to allow them to withstand more frequent weather shocks and help the country recover more quickly. The World Humanitarian Summit, scheduled for May in Istanbul, is an ideal arena for these discussions to begin in earnest.