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In Ethiopia alone, 700,000 people are on the verge of starvation. It is estimated that 8.5 million people are hungry in the country.
A prolonged drought has caused crops to fail and livestock to die in huge numbers.
The situation could get much worse between now and September and likely to continue until April 2018, if people cannot get the help they need, as food stocks are low before the next harvest.
Across the Lake Chad Basin, some 7 million people struggling with food insecurity need asistance.
“Famine does not arrive suddenly or unexpectedly, it comes after months of procrastination and ignored warnings. It is a slow agonizing process, driven by callous national politics and international indifference.” By Nigel Timmins, Oxfam
Today, the world stands on the brink of unprecedented famines. About 30 million people are experiencing alarming hunger, severe levels of food insecurity and malnutrition in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. 10 million of them are facing emergency and famine conditions. Famine is already likely happening in parts of northern Nigeria, while Yemen and Somalia are on the brink. Thanks to aid efforts, it has been pushed back in South Sudan but the food crisis continues to spread across the country.
These are just four of the many countries that are facing high levels of food insecurity this year. In Malawi, Sudan, Afghanistan, DRC or Syria millions of people do not have enough food to feed their families. The situation in some of these countries could worsen if the international community do not address urgent needs and resolve the root causes.
What is famine?
Famine represents the most serious food insecurity situation in terms of both scale and severity.
It occurs when a substantial number of people are dying due to a lack of food or because of a combination of lack of food and disease. When more than 20% of households cannot eat, acute malnutrition exceeds 30% and death and starvation are evident we cannot talk about a humanitarian “emergency” situation anymore but a “famine”. Learn more about the language of food crises.
Famine threat on the map
What are the main causes of famine?
There is not a single root cause that just explains all famines – each context has its unique aspects. However, there is always a fatal combination of various factors that can include conflict, insecurity, access, chronic poverty, lack of trade and severe weather events such as persistent drought.
For example, ongoing war and conflict are the primary drivers of the situation in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, and for Somalia it is drought and weak governance after years of conflict. In some parts of Ethiopia and Kenya, communities are also suffering from a catastrophic drought which makes it incredibly hard for them to buy food locally or have any source of income.
What is sure is that we always have the power to prevent and end famine, but we always let it happen. A declaration of famine is effectively an admission that the international community has failed to organize and act in time and that national governments have been unable or unwilling to respond.
The most severe drought in decades has struck parts of Ethiopia, exacerbated by a particularly strong El Niño effect. This has led to successive failed harvests and widespread livestock deaths in some areas, and humanitarian needs have tripled since the beginning of 2015.
Drought has devastated herders’ livelihoods as it exhausted pastures and water sources, the United Nations agriculture agency said today, stressing that supporting them to get back on their feet and prevent further livestock losses are crucial in the Horn of Africa country, where hunger has been on the rise this year.
The drought has led to a significant number of animals dying or falling ill, particularly in the southern and south-eastern regions of the country, as other areas recover from previous seasons’ El Niño-induced drought,” warned the Food and Agriculture Organization of the (FAO).
FAO pointed out that drought-hit pastoralists face reduced milk production, rising malnutrition, and have limited income-earning capacity and severely constrained access to food.
“Some 8.5 million people – one in 12 people – are now suffering from hunger; of these, 3.3 million people live in Somali Region,” said the UN agriculture agency.
The current food and nutrition crisis is significantly aggravated by the severe blow to pastoral livelihoods. For livestock-dependent families, the animals can literally mean the difference between life and death – especially for children, pregnant and nursing mothers, for whom milk is a crucial source of nutrition.
With up to two million animals lost so far, FAO is focusing on providing emergency livestock support to the most vulnerable pastoralist communities through animal vaccination and treatment, supplementary feed and water, rehabilitating water points, and supporting fodder and feed production.
“It is crucial to provide this support between now and October – when rains are due – to begin the recovery process and prevent further losses of animals. If we don’t act now, hunger and malnutrition will only get worse among pastoral communities,” said Abdoul Karim Bah, FAO Deputy Representative in Ethiopia.
By providing supplementary feed and water for livestock, while simultaneously supporting fodder production, FAO seeks to protect core breeding animals and enable drought-hit families to rebuild their livelihoods.
In addition to FAO-supported destocking and cash-for-work programmes to provide cash for families, animal health campaigns will be reinforced to protect animals, particularly before the rain sets in – when they are at their weakest and more susceptible to parasites or infectious diseases.
Funding appeal
FAO urgently requires $20 million between August and December to come to the aid of Ethiopia’s farmers and herders.
FAO has already assisted almost 500,000 drought-hit people in 2017 through a mix of livestock feed provision, destocking and animal health interventions, thanks to the support of the Ethiopia Humanitarian Fund, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden through FAO’s Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities, the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund, as well as FAO’s own Early Warning Early Action fund and Technical Cooperation Programme.
According to the charity, an estimated 20 million people are at risk of starvation in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia unless provision of relief food is stepped up by national governments and bilateral donors.
So far, only South Sudan has declared famine in some parts of the country while Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia could be the next epicenter of hunger and malnutrition.
NAIROBI, June 19 (Xinhua) — Countries in East and Horn of Africa region are staring at a large-scale humanitarian crisis occasioned by acute food and water scarcity, international charity, Christian Aid said on Monday.
According to the charity, an estimated 20 million people are at risk of starvation in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia unless provision of relief food is stepped up by national governments and bilateral donors.
“The recent disappointing rains in Ethiopia, and also in Kenya have shattered any faint hopes for water sources to fill up, pastures to regenerate and harvest to be viable,” said Christian Aid’s Head of Humanitarian Programs for Africa, Maurice Onyango.
The UN had earlier warned of a looming specter of mass starvation in the greater Horn of Africa region as acute drought and conflicts hobble efforts to feed the population.
So far, only South Sudan has declared famine in some parts of the country while Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia could be the next epicenter of hunger and malnutrition.
The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) says that cumulatively, 13.4 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are food insecure.
Onyango noted that the magnitude of food insecurity in the region has not matched the capacity of humanitarian agencies to respond.
“Communities affected by drought are relying more on outside aid, stretching humanitarian agencies and local authorities to respond,” said Onyango, adding that Christian Aid has so far provided life saving assistance to nearly 50,000 people affected by drought in the region
Besides providing emergency assistance to drought victims in the East and Horn of Africa, Christian Aid and a consortium of partners are investing in resilience projects to help communities cope with climatic shocks.
Onyango said the Charity has built the capacity of farmers and herders in arid zones to manage water and pasture in a sustainable manner.
“If the world wants to avert future catastrophes of this scale, we need to invest in helping communities become more resilient to disasters,” said Onyango.
Finfinnee (Addis Abeba) , June 12/2017 – The year 2016 placed Ethiopia on major newspapers across the world including Financial Times, and Washington Post as well as major broadcast media outlets such as the BBC and Aljazeera all due to the persistent, widespread and escalating anti-government protests that engulfed the country.
The question many asked was “Why are Ethiopians protesting?” Ethiopians were protesting mainly because of, to refer to a July 2001 research by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson: “state and private predation”, (not to be confused with lack of good governance or corruption); state violence; and repression of democratic rights.
Given the yearlong protest and the government’s response to it, it is imperative to analyze Ethiopia’s political instability in an already unstable region. Many political analysts assert that Ethiopia is experiencing an alarming level of political instability that will intensify the instability in the Horn of African region.
In this article, I will use a political instability forecasting model developed by Goldstone et.al (2010) to assess the situation in Ethiopia.
Goldstone et.al (2010) model is distinguished by its accuracy, simplicity, and policy implications. The model accuracy is impressive, exhibiting 80 percent accuracy in predicting the onset of political instability with a two-year lead time. It is unique in the sense that its policy implication – that is, political institution reform – is both within reach in the short term and the least costly option for national and international communities. The model is simple in its specification, too, and it uses only four variables in estimation. The four explanatory variables are infant mortality, conflict in neighboring states, political and economic discrimination, and regime type.
The model predicts an increased likelihood of political instability in countries that exhibit one or more of these factors: high infant mortality rate, location in conflict-prone neighborhood, discrimination against one or more minorities, and a non-democratic regime type. Instead of using a binary measure of regime type (autocracy/democracy) or a three-category measure (autocracy/anocracy/democracy), Goldstone et.al constructed a new categorical measure of regime type. They did this by using the two-polity component (openness in executive recruitment and competitiveness of political participation) from the polity data set and creating a two-dimensional space that can be used to identify the regime types of full autocracy, partial autocracy, partial democracy, partial democracy with factionalism and full democracy. (Please See table below.)
Regime Type: Ethiopia (1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2014)
Competitiveness of political participation
Executive Recruitment
Repressed (0)
Suppressed (1)
Unregulated (2)
Factional (3)
Transitional (4)
Competitive (5)
Ascription(1)
FA
FA
PA
PA
PA
PA
Ascription +Designation (2)
FA
FA
PA
PA
PA
PA
Designation(3)
FA
FA
PA
PAETH 2005, 2010 & 2014
PA
PA
Self-Selection(4)
FA
FA
PA
PA
PA
PA
Transition fromself-selection (5)
FA
FA
PA
PA
PA
PA
Ascritption +Election (6)
PA
PA
PD
PDF
PD
PD
Transitional orRestricted election (7)
PA
PA
PD
PDFETH 1995 & 2000
PD
PD
Competitive Election(8)
PA
PA
PD
PDF
PD
FD
The table format and analysis is reproduced from Goldstone et. al (2010), and data is based on POLITY IV scales for Executive Recruitment (EXREC) and Competitiveness of Political Participation (PARCOMP). FA – Full Autocracy, PA – Partial Autocracy, PD – Partial Democracy, PDF – Partial Democracy with Factionalism, and FD – Full Democracy
Where does Ethiopia stand along these four independent variables?
The first variable of interest is infant mortality rate. Over the past twenty years, Ethiopia has made great progress in reducing infant mortality rate compared to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). According to this data from the World Bank, in 1990, Ethiopia’s infant mortality rate was 121.6 while SSA’s was 108.5; in 2015, Ethiopia’s number was 41.4 while SSA’s was 56.4. One can say that Ethiopia’s performance on this front is truly impressive.
The second variable is whether the country is located in conflict-prone neighborhood. Ethiopia shares borders with six countries: Somalia (1640 km), South Sudan (1299 km), Eritrea (1033 km), Kenya (867 km), Sudan (744 km), and Djibouti (342 km). Based on data from the Center for Systemic Peace’s Major Episodes of Political Violence, Ethiopia is situated in a neighborhood ravaged by prolonged conflict. Somalia, which shares the longest border with Ethiopia, has suffered an ongoing civil war since 1988 that claimed the lives of more than 117,000 Somalis and led to the migration and displacement of hundreds of thousands of its people. South Sudan, which shares the second longest border with Ethiopia, has gone through a devastating civil war (1998-2014) and an ongoing ethnic violence with a loss of 16,000 lives. Eritrea (part of Ethiopia until its succession in 1991-2) experienced war with Ethiopia itself from 1998-2000, a war, which, by many estimates, cost the lives of more than 70, 000 on both sides. Kenya, a relatively stable country, has been subject to spurts of ethnic violence between 1991 and 2008, costing 4,300 lives. And it is estimated that the 1983-2002 ethnic war in Sudan had claimed the lives of nearly one million Sudanese; and the recent ethnic violence (2011-2014) has claimed 4,000 lives. Djibouti’s civil war (1991-1994) had also led to the death of 1,000 people in the tiniest Horn of African nation.
It is clear, then, that Ethiopia is surrounded by countries characterized by recurring ethnic violence and civil war. There is a need to analyze this “neighborhood factor” in Ethiopia by incorporating four other factors that significantly increase the impact of a “bad neighborhood” on political stability.
First, Ethiopia itself is marred by its own civil war. Its struggles with Oromo separatists (1999-2000) and ethnic violence among the Somali and Oromo people (2007-2014) have resulted in the death of thousands.
Second, Ethiopia is directly involved in either peace-keeping missions (in the case of Darfur in Sudan and Somalia) or in conflict (in the case of Somalia and Eritrea) which have separate implications in several neighboring countries.
Third, the prolonged nature of the conflicts in these neighboring countries and within Ethiopia itself add another dimension.
Finally, different ethnic groups affected by ethnic violence or ethnic wars span across all the region’s borders (Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, South Sudan, and Eritrea), increasing the risk of political instability.
The third factor is whether there exist political or economic discrimination. According to the Minorities at Risk Project by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), four ethnic groups are subject to discrimination in Ethiopia: the Oromo, Somali, Amhara and Afar. Although to a lesser extent, the report also named Tigreans as a minority at risk, stating that:
“Currently, Tigreans possess special status within Ethiopian politics and society with the best official posts, military positions, and of university slots allotted to those of the Tigray province … While Tigreans remain an advantaged minority in Ethiopia to date, it is unclear whether the EPRDF’s mix of political maneuvering and governmental heavy-handedness will last.”
In addition to the minorities subjected to political and economic discrimination, the Political Instability Task Force (PTIF) has identified possible target groups of genocide and politicide in Ethiopia, including supporters of the Oromo and Somali secessionists (2001, 2005 and 2011) and the people of Gambella (2005) and Anuak (2005, 2011).
The last variable of interest is regime type. Ethiopia had a partial democracy with factionalism from 1995-2000 but then transitioned to a partial autocracy from 2005-2014. The country’s score worsened in terms of executive recruitment, dropping from a 7 (transitional/restricted election) to a 3 (designation). This suggests that executive recruitment is not competitive, but rather closed to contestation. The second component, competitiveness of political participation, has remained factional since 1995. It is evident that the relationship among political elites has not improved in the last 20 years, and the political sphere in the country remains exclusive.
Ethiopia’s status based on these four variables indicates that the country is highly likely to experience political instability (civil war or adverse regime change) in the near future. It is imperative that all concerned parties- the Ethiopian people, political groups, civic society, the international community and donor countries, step up their efforts to prevent the onset of political instability in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. AS
NAIROBI, May 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Hunger is likely to reach emergency levels in Ethiopia and the number in need of food aid will rise beyond the current 7.7 million, experts said, as drought has decimated livestock, rains have been erratic and aid is in short supply.
Prolonged drought, followed by floods, has pushed millions across East Africa into crisis, with 7 million in neighbouring Somalia also needing aid, the United Nations said as it grapples with the highest global hunger levels in decades.
“Despite enhanced rainfall at the end of April into early May over many areas of Ethiopia, food security outcomes are still expected to deteriorate,” the U.S.-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) said on Wednesday.
Herders in southeastern Ethiopia will be worst hit over the next three months, it said, with hunger reaching the fourth “emergency” level on a five-phase scale, where the fifth level is famine.
“The current marginal improvements in pasture and water are likely to be depleted by early June, which will mean rangeland resources will rapidly decline, and subsequently livestock body conditions,” it said, with the next rains due in October.
The number of Ethiopians who need food aid surged to 7.7 million from 5.6 million between January and April.
This number is expected to increase in the second half of the year, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week.
“Increased funding is needed urgently, in particular to address immediate requirements for clean drinking water, much of which is being delivered long distances by truck as regular wells have dried up,” it said.
The Trump administration has proposed to drastically cut U.S. funding for global health and food aid programmes amid opposition from Congress.
(Reporting by Katy Migiro @katymigiro, editing by Alisa Tang. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women´s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change.
At the end of April, the National Disaster Risk Management Commission reported the number of people in need of immediate food assistance had reached 7.7 million, an increase by 2.1 million from the commission’s estimate at the beginning of the year.
In 2015 and 2016, Ethiopia experienced its worst drought in half a century in which 10.2 million people needed emergency aid, while 7.9 million people were chronically food insecure and dependent on an ongoing relief program. Still reeling from the effect of that devastating episode, which was induced by El Niño, an ocean-warming climatic phenomena with global impact on weather patterns, swathes of the country have experienced rain failure again.
The drought is also causing an increase in the number of internal refugees. According to the International Organization for Migration there are currently 696,000 displaced persons at 456 sites throughout Ethiopia.
Exacerbating the problem, year-on-year food inflation has reached 12.6 per cent, the highest since January 2016
With a recent increase in the number of people needing emergency food assistance, the impact of Ethiopia’s drought is worsening. And that comes only around a year after one of the country’s most severe dry spells in decades.
At the end of April, the National Disaster Risk Management Commission reported the number of people in need of immediate food assistance had reached 7.7 million, an increase by 2.1 million from the commission’s estimate at the beginning of the year. At that time, $948 million dollars was requested to help the affected people — who are mostly in the south and east of the country — under half of which has been contributed.
In the worst hit Somali regional state, an estimated 785,000 people are suffering from hunger, malnutrition and water shortages. After visiting the area in late February, UN Central Emergency Response Fund’s Stephen O’Brien stressed the importance of prompt action. “Millions of people’s lives, livelihoods and wellbeing depend on continued donor support,” he said. “Time lost means lives lost.”
Exacerbating the problem, year-on-year food inflation has reached 12.6 per cent, the highest since January 2016, according to Ethiopia’s Central Statistical Agency, with major staples such as teff, maize, wheat, sorghum and barley exhibiting increases. The government had previously pledged to keep the inflation rate in the single-digit range.
Although central bank governor Teklewold Atnafu told lawmakers in April that prices were under control, economic research firm Business Monitor International expects soaring inflation in coming months because of reduced agricultural output due to the lack of rain. However, the statistics agency says that despite the drought an increase in production has been registered in the last main Meher season (June to September 2016) harvesting season with close to 290.4 million quintals of crops yielded. That means production showed an 8.8 percent increase from last year, which is likely to be roughly in line with Ethiopia’s consistently high official economic growth figures.
Food inflation is up in spite of official reports of increased food production.
An assessment of the secondary Belg season (roughly, February to April) will be used as a basis for a revised Humanitarian Requirements Document that is expected to be released in July. Planners hope that early publication of the document, capturing the impact of the Belg rains, will help mobilize donations to prevent a projected break in the delivery of food aid.
In 2015 and 2016, Ethiopia experienced its worst drought in half a century in which 10.2 million people needed emergency aid, while 7.9 million people were chronically food insecure and dependent on an ongoing relief program. Still reeling from the effect of that devastating episode, which was induced by El Niño, an ocean-warming climatic phenomena with global impact on weather patterns, swathes of the country have experienced rain failure again.
According to the World Bank, it often takes as many as four years for households to recover from a drought because of asset depletion. The non-governmental organization Save the Children says the previous crisis left more than half the nation’s pastoralists destitute due to loss of livestock. An April announcement of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization predicts that El Niño has a 50 to 60 per cent probability of returning this year.
In 2015 and 2016, Ethiopia experienced its worst drought in half a century.
The ongoing Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) currently provides regular food or cash transfers for 8 million Ethiopians, half of whom live in currently drought-affected areas. During severe rain shortages, the program expands to include new beneficiaries, as well as increasing the period of support from five to seven months of the year. To deal with the extra burden, one of the main donors, the World Bank, approved an extra $100 million for the PNSP on May 2, the same amount it topped the program up with last year. The PSNP recipients, plus the 7.7 people in need of emergency support, amount to more than one-sixth of Ethiopia’s population.
The drought is also causing an increase in the number of internal refugees. According to the International Organization for Migration there are currently 696,000 displaced persons at 456 sites throughout Ethiopia. And, additionally, the country hosted 830,000 refugees from other countries as of March. Because neighboring South Sudan and Somalia are deeply impacted by the conflict and drought, respectively, an increase in the number of refugees is likely.
UN OCHA’s latest humanitarian funding update, from May 10, says there is a $507 million shortfall, of which $291m is needed for food aid. After avoiding catastrophe last year, donors praised Ethiopia’s government for diverting as much as $700 million to the relief operation. (The main sources were alleged to be cash allocated for road development and funds that had accrued in an oil stabilization fund). Mitiku Kassa, head of Ethiopia’s disaster commission, is now urging donors to step up their funding, while the government is again mobilizing all the resources it can. “We all must work hand in hand to tackle this problem,” he says.
But even if that occurs, while the country is still managing to avoid the dreaded famine classification, the impact of successive serious droughts on a fragile and resource-stretched nation is mounting.
On Thursday, the Ethiopian government increased its count of the number of people requiring emergency food aid from 5.6 million to 7.7 million, a move that aid agencies say was long overdue. The figure is expected to rise further as southeast Ethiopia confronts another fierce drought.
But with food crises erupting across the continent and the government’s budget strained by last year’s drought, the money isn’t there to fight it. There could eventually be as many people in Ethiopia needing emergency food assistance as in Somalia and South Sudan combined.
There have also been accusations that the government is playing down the severity of the crisis to keep the country from looking bad internationally. During the earlier drought, it was months before the government admitted there was a problem, in part because Ethiopia had gained a reputation as Africa’s rising star and didn’t want to go back to being associated with drought and famine.
The contrast is clear in the bustling capital, Addis Ababa, where rainy skies and a hive of construction projects make it feel thousands of miles away from any drought. While Pizza Hut restaurants are set to soon open in the capital, thousands of children in the arid southeast suffer from acute malnutrition, and cholera is ripping through the relief camps.
World Food Program supplies are distributed in a village in Jijiga district, part of Ethiopia’s Somali region. (Michael Tewelde/World Food Program)
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The announcement by the United Nations in March that 20 million people in four countries were teetering on the edge of famine stunned the world and rammed home the breadth of the humanitarian crisis faced by so many in 2017.
Yet even as donors struggle to meet the severe needs in the war-torn nations of Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, another crisis, more environmental in nature, is taking place nearby — nearly unnoticed.
On Thursday, the Ethiopian government increased its count of the number of people requiring emergency food aid from 5.6 million to 7.7 million, a move that aid agencies say was long overdue. The figure is expected to rise further as southeast Ethiopia confronts another fierce drought.
But with food crises erupting across the continent and the government’s budget strained by last year’s drought, the money isn’t there to fight it. There could eventually be as many people in Ethiopia needing emergency food assistance as in Somalia and South Sudan combined.
Ethiopia, long associated with a devastating famine in the 1980s, returned to the headlines last year when it was hit by severe drought in the highland region, affecting 10.2 million people. Food aid poured in, the government spent hundreds of millions of its own money, and famine was averted.
Now it’s the turn of the lowland region, particularly the area bordering Somalia, where a drought brought on by warming temperatures in the Indian Ocean has ravaged the flocks of the herders in the region and left people without food.
With their sheep and goats mostly dead, the nomads are clustered in camps surviving on aid from the government and international agencies — but that food is about to run out.
“This response capacity that is currently holding it at bay is about to be overwhelmed,” said Charlie Mason, humanitarian director of Save the Children, which is particularly active in Ethiopia’s impoverished Somali region. “We’ve spent all the money we’ve got, basically.”
With donors focused on Somalia across the border, little international aid has found its way to the Ethiopian areas hit by that drought. “I think it’s partly because there are other priorities, and they are not signaling loudly enough to donor offices,” Mason said.
According to a document detailing Ethiopian’s humanitarian needs that was drawn up in January by the government and aid agencies, Ethiopia needs nearly $1 billion to confront the crisis, more than half of which it still lacks. That figure also does not take into account the revised estimates in the numbers of people requiring aid.
During last year’s drought, Ethiopia came up with more than $400 million of its own money to fight off famine, but this year, it has been able to commit only $47 million, probably because of an exhausted budget.
There have also been accusations that the government is playing down the severity of the crisis to keep the country from looking bad internationally. During the earlier drought, it was months before the government admitted there was a problem, in part because Ethiopia had gained a reputation as Africa’s rising star and didn’t want to go back to being associated with drought and famine.
The contrast is clear in the bustling capital, Addis Ababa, where rainy skies and a hive of construction projects make it feel thousands of miles away from any drought. While Pizza Hut restaurants are set to soon open in the capital, thousands of children in the arid southeast suffer from acute malnutrition, and cholera is ripping through the relief camps.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which is working in Ethiopia’s drought-hit Somali region, has started cutting its food rations to 80 percent. It is short $121 million for its Ethiopia operation this year, and the money is expected to run out over the summer.
If no new money arrives, the rations could be cut to 420 calories for the whole day — the equivalent of a burger. The government’s food contribution will probably suffer a similar fate.
“It’s stretching the humanitarian community,” WFP regional spokeswoman Challiss McDonough said, referring to the string of crises in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere on the continent. “I don’t think of it as donor fatigue. Quite frankly, the donors have been extremely generous, continuing to be so — but they are overwhelmed.”
There is also the fact that the Horn of Africa has been incredibly unlucky these past few years in terms of weather. Though famine was averted, many parts of the Ethiopian highlands are still recovering from the 2015-2016 drought, which was attributed to the El Niño ocean-warming phenomenon in the Pacific.
The U.N. World Meteorological Organization said Friday that there is a 50 percent to 60 percent chance that the Pacific will see another strong warming trend this year, which means Ethiopia’s highlands will be slammed again at a time when world resources are scarcer than ever.
“The droughts are coming more frequently and more often and they are worse — and that’s climate change. That’s very, very clear,” McDonough said. “You talk to any farmer how are the rains now compared to 20-30 years ago, they see a difference in their lifetimes, particularly the older ones.”
Even while they have one of the smallest carbon footprints on the globe, herders’ fragile existence in the arid climate of the Horn of Africa is probably the most threatened by climate change.
Adding to aid organizations’ concerns is a proposal by the Trump administration to slash U.S. contributions to international aid institutions, including the WFP. The U.S. government is the largest donor to the program. The proposed cuts, part of the president’s 2018 budget blueprint, are likely to face stiff opposition in Congress.
Paul Schemm is the Post’s overnight foreign editor based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, joining the paper in 2016. He previously worked for the Associated Press as North Africa chief correspondent based in Morocco and prior to that in Cairo as part of the Middle East regional bureau.
Freelance journalist based in Addis Ababa and regular contributor to IRIN
DOLO ADO, 19 April 2017
Dead camels rot on the outskirts of informal settlements in Ethiopia’s rain-starved Somali region as their owners, once proudly self-sufficient pastoralists, turn to government aid to stay alive.
Ethiopia is facing a drought so terrible that nomadic herders, the hardiest of survivors, have been pushed to the brink. The lucky ones receive supplies of food and brackish water, but the majority, who have settled in spontaneous camps in the remotest reaches, must look after themselves.
“We call this drought sima,” said 82-year-old Abdu Karim. “It means ‘everyone is affected’. Even when I was a child, no one spoke of a drought like this one.”
Across the Horn of Africa, people are struggling after three successive years of failed rains. In Somalia and Yemen, there is real fear of famine. While Ethiopia’s remote southern region has been spared the warfare that has deepened the crisis confronting its neighbours, the drought has been no less brutal.
“Having lost most of their livestock, they have also spent out the money they had in reserve to try to keep their last few animals alive,” said Charlie Mason, humanitarian director at Save the Children.
“For those who have lost everything, all they can now do is go to a government assistance site for food and water.”
Livestock are the backbone of the region’s economy. Pastoralists here are estimated to have lost in excess of $200 million-worth of cattle, sheep, goats, and camels. That is not only a blow to their wealth, but also deprives them of the meat and milk that is the mainstay of the pastoralist life-support system.
Last year, more than 10 million people were affected by an El Niño-induced drought. The government spent an unprecedented $700 million, while the international community made up the rest of the $1.8 billion needed to meet their needs.
This year, the appeal is for $948 million to help 5.6 million drought-affected people, mainly in the southern and eastern parts of the country. So far, only $23.7 million has been received.
“Last year’s response by the government was pretty remarkable,” said World Vision’s Ethiopia director, Edward Brown. “We dodged a bullet. But now the funding gaps are larger on both sides. The UN’s ability is constrained as it looks for big donors – you’ve already got the US talking of slashing foreign aid.”
Under strain
The government has a well-established safety net programme managed by the World Bank that supports the chronically food insecure, typically with cash-for-work projects.
But it doesn’t pick up those affected by sudden shocks like the current drought. They fall under a new and separate programme, which is struggling to register all those in need.
There are 58 settlements for the internally displaced in the Somali region currently receiving government aid. But that’s only a fraction of the 222 sites containing nearly 400,000 displaced people identified in a survey by the International Organization for Migration.
Forty-four percent of these camps reported no access to food, and only 31 percent had a water source within a 20-minute walk.
“People were surviving from what they could forage to eat or sell but now there is nothing left,” said one senior aid worker who visited a settlement 70 kilometres east of the southern town of Dolo Ado, where 650 displaced pastoralist families weren’t receiving any aid at all.
The only livestock left alive in the camp was one skinny cow, its rib cage undulating through its skin, and her new-born calf. In some shelters people were reported as too weak to move.
James Jeffrey/IRIN
“There’s a logical reason to limiting the number of temporary assistance sites – because otherwise getting assistance to people scattered over such a large area becomes a massive challenge,” said Mason.
“The authorities are doing their best. This is a natural disaster, which has affected a huge number of people over an area larger than the UK or New Zealand, and we’re in a race against the clock to get enough food and clean water to enough people in time.”
But given the security restrictions on travel in the Somali region, and the well-known nervousness aid agencies have over antagonising the government, it is very hard to gauge how many people may have fallen through the cracks and are not receiving assistance.
Refugees vs IDPs
The Ethiopian government is far more open over the refugees it helps. It has maintained an open-door policy and currently shelters an estimated 800,000.
Just outside Dolo Ado, where the Ethiopian border intersects with Kenya and Somalia, are two enormous camps. With rows of corrugated iron roofs glinting in the sun, each houses about 40,000 Somalis escaping their own food crisis and ongoing conflict.
“I came with my family because of drought and fear,” said 51-year-old Hasaam Muhammed Ali. He arrived in Buramino camp in 2012 with his two wives and 17 children. “People have different opinions but I know what is there – I will not go back. Perhaps, if the country gets peace like Ethiopia, I might.”
Refugees complain of headaches and itchy skin due to the pervading heat of 38 – 42 degrees Celsius, and of a recent reduction in their monthly allowance of cereals and grains from 16 to 13.5 kilograms.
However, they are guaranteed that ration, along with water, health and education services – none of which is available to IDPs in a settlement on the outskirts of Dolo Ado.
“We don’t oppose support for refugees – they should be helped as they face bigger problems,” said 70-year-old Abiyu Alsow. “But we are frustrated as we aren’t getting anything from the government or NGOs.”
Abiyu spoke amid a cluster of women, children, and a few old men beside makeshift domed shelters fashioned out of sticks and fabric. Husbands were away either trying to source money from relatives, looking for daily labour in the town, or making charcoal for family use and to sell.
“When people cross borders, the world is more interested,” said Hamidu Jalleh from the UN’s emergency aid coordination office, OCHA. “Especially if they are fleeing conflict, it is a far more captivating issue. But the issue of internally displaced persons doesn’t [generate] the same attention.”
In the Somali region’s northern Siti zone, IDP camps from droughts in 2015 and 2016 are still full. It takes between seven and 10 years for pastoralists to rebuild flocks and herds after losses of more than 40 percent, according to research by the International Livestock Research Institute and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“Humanitarian responses around the world are managing to get people through these massive crises to prevent loss of life,” said Mason. “But there’s not enough financial backing to get people back on their feet again.”
And Ethiopia’s crisis is far from over. The main spring Gu/Ganna rains have finally begun in parts of the Somali region, but they were a month late.
The forecast is that they will be below average and won’t regenerate pasture sufficiently for the pastoralists, who have lost so much, to rebuild their lives.
Acute food insecurity and conflict in Africa by Africa Center for Strategic Studies
Nineteen African countries are facing acute levels of food insecurity. Ten of those countries are experiencing internal conflict.
Nineteen African countries are facing acute levels of food insecurity. Ten of those countries are experiencing internal conflict. Click on image to download as PDF.
Historic droughts in East and Southern Africa have caused food prices to skyrocket to record levels, doubling the price of staple cereals in some areas. The areas of greatest food insecurity, however, are those affected by conflict. An arc of conflict-affected countries, largely overlapping regions of greatest food insecurity, spans the center of the continent from Somalia to Mali. In addition to disrupting production, conflict undercuts markets that would normally bring food to areas of greatest shortage. In some places, conflict prevents even conducting a full assessment of the level of food insecurity. And because countries in conflict lack the resilience or coping mechanisms of more stable areas, their food crises tend to last longer and have more lasting impact. In short: Nineteen African countries are facing crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels of food insecurity Ten of those countries are experiencing civil conflict Eight of those ten countries are autocracies Those eight are also the source of 82 percent of the 18.5 million Africans that are internally displaced or refugees
Of the 19 African countries facing acute food insecurity, 10 are experiencing conflict, and 8 of those are autocratically governed. pic.twitter.com/h6gMwg6Osn
Farmers, traders and consumers across East and Southern Africa are feeling the impact of consecutive seasons of drought that have scorched harvests and ruined livelihoods.
Ethiopia:The strongest El Niño phenomenon on record led to an extreme drought in 2016, with 10.2 million in need of food aid. A new drought means 2017 could be just as dire, throwing an additional 5.7 million people into crisis. Farmers and herders found their resilience tested to the limit last year. They have very limited resources left to cope with the current crisis. More at IRIN: Drought in Africa.
2016 was a challenging year for Ethiopia. But 2017 could be equally dire, as the country has been hit by a new drought. As 2.4 million farmers and herders cannot sustainably practice their livelihoods and reinvigorate their already drought-stricken farms, the new drought is throwing an additional 5.7 million people into crisis.
At the launch of the Humanitarian Requirements Document, UN Humanitarian Chief Stephen O’Brien called for US$948 million to meet people’s survival and livelihoods needs in 2017.
“We need to act now before it is too late,” he said. “We have no time to lose. Livestock are already dying, pastoralists and farmers are already fleeing their homes in search of water and pasture, and hunger and malnutrition levels will rise soon if assistance does not arrive on time.”
Source: 2017 Humanitarian Requirements Document
Back-to-back cycles of poor or non-existent rainfall since 2015, coupled with the strongest El Niño on record, led to Ethiopia’s worst drought in decades. The new drought has hit southern and eastern regions, and pastoralists and farmers are fleeing their homes to find water and pasture.
The new drought extends beyond Ethiopia’s borders—in Kenya and Somalia, it has already pushed 1.3 million people and 5 million people into hunger, respectively. Severe water and pasture shortages in Somalia have resulted in livestock deaths, disrupted livelihoods and caused massive food shortages.
A negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) resulted in below average rainfall over East Africa and led to drought situations in Somali, Oromia and SNNP regions. The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate and more than 4.2 million people in these regions are targeted to receive food aid in 2017 (out of a total of 5.6 million people estimated to require food assistance in Ethiopia in 2017). These people are also in critical need of emergency water, health and nutrition services.
The Ministry of Health, with support from health partners and UNICEF, has started a regular national measles vaccination targeting 22.9 million children.
The Government of Ethiopia, with support from WASH partners, including UNICEF, is providing water rations to an estimated 839,500 people in Afar, Oromia, SNNP, Somali and Tigray regions.
Child protection and education sectors remain largely underfunded, with no funds received for 2017 in either programme. Both programmes play a critical role in protecting emergency affected children and addressing children’s psychosocial needs.
SITUATION IN NUMBERS
5.6 million people* require relief food assistance in 2017
303,000 children* are expected to require treatment for SAM in 2017
9.2 million people* require access to safe drinking water and sanitation services
2 million school-aged children* require emergency school feeding and learning materials assistance
There are 801,079 refugees in Ethiopia (UNHCR, January 2017)
Situation Overview and Humanitarian Needs
The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate in Somali, Oromia plus parts of SNNP regions. According to the 2017 Humanitarian Requirements Document (HRD), 5.6 million people require relief food aid in Ethiopia, including more than 4.2 million people in the Horn of Africa (HoA) drought affected regions. However, as the drought situation is worsening, an increase in people requiring food aid is expected. Water shortage and depletion of pasture have resulted in the displacement of mainly pastoralist populations to neighbouring woredas and regions as well as the deaths of a large number of livestock. In addition, the displacement of families has further disrupted already limited education opportunities for children and significantly increased the risk for children’s separation from families, abuse and exploitation. In Afar, failure of seasonal rains in December 2016 has resulted in critical water shortage.
In early February 2017, UNICEF has undertaken an assessment of the impact of the drought in the most affected zones of SNNP region (Gamo Gofa, Segen and South Omo). The assessment findings indicate that water, food and livestock feed are the most pressing needs in the affected areas.
The renewed influx of Somali and South Sudanese refugees into Somali and SNNP regions, respectively, has further stressed the already dire situation in these regions. In SNNP, a total of 4,800 families seeking asylum have fled South Sudan due to food insecurity and conflict and have reportedly settled in Ngangatom woreda of South Omo zone in January 2017. In Somali region, 4,106 asylum seekers from Somalia have arrived in Ethiopia between 1 January and 28 February 2017, fleeing from a conflict exacerbated by food insecurity.
Mr. Steinman advises foreign democracy movements. He authored the novel “Money, Blood and Conscience” about Ethiopia’s secret genocide.
In what could be an important test of the Trump Administration’s attitude toward foreign aid, the new United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, and UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien have called on the international community to give the Ethiopian government another $948 million to assist a reported 5.6 million people facing starvation.
Speaking in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, during the recent 28th Summit of the African Union, Guterres described Ethiopia as a “pillar of stability” in the tumultuous Horn of Africa, praised its government for an effective response to last year’s climate change-induced drought that left nearly 20 million people needing food assistance, and asked the world to show “total solidarity” with the regime.
Women and children wait for care at an outpatient treatment center in Lerra village, Wolayta, Ethiopia, on June 10, 2008. (Jose Cendon/Bloomberg News)
Ethiopia is aflame with rebellions against its unpopular dictatorship, which tried to cover up the extent of last year’s famine. But even if the secretary general’s encouraging narrative were true, it still begs the question: Why, despite ever-increasing amounts of foreign support, can’t this nation of 100 million clever, enterprising people feed itself? Other resource-poor countries facing difficult environmental challenges manage to do so.
Two numbers tell the story in a nutshell:
1. The amount of American financial aid received by Ethiopia’s government since it took power: $30 billion.
2. The amount stolen by Ethiopia’s leaders since it took power: $30 billion.
The latter figure is based on the UN’s own 2015 report on Illicit Financial Outflows by a panel chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki and another from Global Financial Integrity, an American think tank. These document $2-3 billion—an amount roughly equaling Ethiopia’s annual foreign aid and investment—being drained from the country every year, mostly through over- and under-invoicing of imports and exports.
Ethiopia’s far-left economy is centrally controlled by a small ruling clique that has grown fantastically wealthy. Only they could be responsible for this enormous crime. In other words, the same Ethiopian leadership that’s begging the world for yet another billion for its hungry people is stealing several times that amount every year.
America and the rest of the international community have turned a blind eye to this theft of taxpayer money and the millions of lives destroyed in its wake, because they rely on Ethiopia’s government to provide local counterterror cooperation, especially with the fight against Al-Shabab in neighboring Somalia. But even there we’re being taken. Our chief aim in Somalia is to eliminate Al-Shabab. Our Ethiopian ally’s aim is twofold: Keep Somalia weak and divided so it can’t unite with disenfranchised fellow Somalis in Ethiopia’s adjoining, gas-rich Ogaden region; and skim as much foreign assistance as possible. No wonder we’re losing.
The Trump Administration has not evinced particular interest in democracy promotion, but much of Ethiopia’s and the region’s problems stem from Ethiopia’s lack of the accountability that only democracy confers. A more accountable Ethiopian government would be forced to implement policies designed to do more than protect its control of the corruption. It would have to free Ethiopia’s people to develop their own solutions to their challenges and end their foreign dependency. It would be compelled to make the fight on terror more effective by decreasing fraud, basing military promotions on merit instead of cronyism and ending the diversion of state resources to domestic repression. An accountable Ethiopian government would have to allow more relief to reach those who truly need it and reduce the waste of U.S. taxpayers’ generous funding. Representative, accountable government would diminish the Ogaden’s secessionist tendencies that drive Ethiopia’s counterproductive Somalia strategy.
Prime Minister of Ethiopia Hailemariam Desalegn attends the 28th African Union summit in Addis Ababa on January 30, 2017. (ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/Getty Images)
But Ethiopia’s government believes it has America over a barrel and doesn’t have to be accountable to us or to its own people. Like Mr. Guterres, past U.S. presidents have been afraid to confront the regime, which even forced President Barack Obama into a humiliating public defense of its last stolen election. The result has been a vicious cycle of enablement, corruption, famine and terror.
Whether the Trump Administration will be willing to play the same game remains to be seen. The answer will serve as a signal to other foreign leaders who believe America is too craven to defend its money and moral values.
5.6 Million Ethiopians are in need of emergency food assistance in 2017. Failed rains from late September to November caused a new drought in Oromia, Somali and SNNP regions. Pastoralist and agro pastoralist communities in Borena, Guji, Bale and East Hararge zones of Oromia region, all the nine zones of Somali region and Omo, Gamo Gofa and Segen zones of SNNP region are the most affected.
Drought exacerbated by El Niño, combined with extensive flooding, disease outbreaks and the disruption of basic public services, continue to have a negative impact on the lives and livelihoods of 9.7 million Ethiopians. Urgent funding gaps for the response remain across multiple sectors to the end of 2016, notably for response to Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD), for interventions in animal health and food assistance. Major funding requirements are already anticipated for early 2017, as there are concerning indications that the current negative Indian Ocean Dipole, may affect water availability, livestock body condition and Meher harvest performance in southern and eastern Ethiopia.
Some 2,000,000 pastoralists and agro pastoralists need emergency food assistance; serious water shortage continues to affect the regions
Debre Mekuria breastfeeds her malnourished baby in Seriel health centre in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara region, Feb. 13, 2016. REUTERS/Tristan Martin
NAIROBI, May 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation, 4 May 2016) – Over the years, Ethiopian mother-of-three Hana Mekonnen has received all sorts of aid designed to free her from the bitter trap of poverty and hunger: goats, cash transfers, resettlement and, of course, sacks of grain.
None has worked.
Hana’s one-year-old son was diagnosed with malnutrition in October, usually a time of plenty in Ethiopia’s mountainous Amhara region, when the main harvest starts to come in.
The Horn of Africa nation’s worst drought in 50 years has left her destitute, reduced to arguing with neighbors over the allocation of aid rations.
“Because of the drought, we are all poor,” she said, seated in her dimly-lit hut with her child on her lap.
“No one in this village has anything to give their children. We all live on food aid.”
Hana blames God for failed rains, but development experts say her chronic poverty is the result of traditional farming methods, a soaring population and a lack of alternative sources of income.
Millions of farmers and herders across Africa have been pushed into crisis by drought this year, raising questions about the ability of aid to break the hunger cycle, despite a resolve to do so after famine killed 260,000 people in Somalia in 2011.
How to make people less vulnerable to natural disasters, and improving the aid response when they do strike, are key themes of the World Humanitarian Summit on May 23-24 in Istanbul.
SAFETY NET
Hana receives cash and food six months a year, in exchange for environmental work, like digging ponds and planting trees.
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), set up in 2005, helps her through the ‘lean season’ between harvests, while also rehabilitating land and building roads, health posts and schools to tackle some of the underlying causes of poverty.
The scheme, administered by the government and largely funded by international donors, was set up to end the annual scramble for emergency funding to feed hungry Ethiopians, averaging 5 million a year in the decade before its launch.
It has made the provision of food aid more predictable and cheaper, helping to prevent the terrible famines that tarnished Ethiopia’s international image in the 1970s and 80s.
But it has not ended hunger.
“Ethiopia is, and has demonstrated itself to be, very effective at response,” said Laura Hammond, who heads the development studies department at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
“But there’s still this level of vulnerability and poverty that is persistent and that’s harder to turn a corner on.”
This year, one in five Ethiopians need food aid, with 8 million receiving support from the PSNP and another 10.2 million from a $1.4 billion humanitarian appeal.
By 2020, the project – Africa’s largest social safety net – will have cost donors $5.7 billion, raising questions about its sustainability.
“Ultimately, there does need to be a vision for this not being a donor-financed safety net,” Greg Collins, director of the Center for Resilience at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We more and more need to be investing in creating opportunities that allow those who are able to graduate from the PSNP.”
Initial optimism about a rapid shift to self-sufficiency has been replaced with an acceptance that some Ethiopians will be dependent on aid indefinitely.
GROWTH STORY
The busy roads, endless construction sites and new light railway snaking over Ethiopia’s capital are testament to the double-digit growth it has enjoyed for the last decade.
This growth has led to a dramatic drop in poverty rates, with the share of the population living below the poverty line falling from 56 to 31 percent between 2000 and 2011, according to World Bank data.
“Ethiopia is the darling of Africa at the moment,” said Lindsey Jones, a researcher with the London-based Overseas Development Institute. “Its economy is expanding massively.”
But deeper structural changes, like urbanization and industrialization, are needed to end poverty, experts say.
From the early 1990s, Ethiopia pursued an agriculture-led development strategy, under visionary strongman Meles Zenawi.
Increased use of fertilizer, better seeds and expert advice produced sharp increases in yields, benefiting the 92 percent of Ethiopians who, according to the World Bank, own land.
As Ethiopia’s population has doubled since the early 1990s, many people’s farms are often only half a hectare.
“There is no means to increase the landholding size,” said Mitiku Kassa, head of Ethiopia’s National Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee. “The only option is to increase the productivity of the land by using agricultural technologies.”
Each ward has three development agents, graduates in crop and animal sciences, who demonstrate to villagers how to increase their yields, he said.
But farmers remain vulnerable to poor rains, unlike workers in manufacturing and services jobs, which have proven critical in reducing poverty in countries like Bangladesh and Rwanda.
Ethiopia’s recent investment in the food processing, textile and flower industries is a step towards diversifying the economy away from its heavy dependence on farming, said SOAS’s Hammond.
ACT BEFORE DROUGHT
The most popular buzzword among aid workers after the 2011 drought across the Horn of Africa was “resilience”, which means boosting people’s ability to bounce back from shocks like a failed harvest or a death in the family.
Projects that provide families with alternative sources of income, such as livestock, or loans to set up small businesses, can make them less vulnerable when disaster hits.
“What’s needed is more investment in action before droughts strike,” said Michael Mosselmans, head of humanitarian policy and practice for Christian Aid.
Every dollar spent on preparedness saves seven dollars in disaster aftermath, the United Nations says, but it is harder to generate enthusiasm for preventative projects than tackling visible crises, like starving children.
At the World Humanitarian Summit, Christian Aid is calling for 5 percent of aid to be spent on resilience and disaster preparedness, up from the current 0.4 percent.
Ethiopia is not holding its breath.
The government’s Mitiku says efforts to end hunger for women like Hana must be driven by Ethiopia itself.
“Emergencies will continue, in my view, as long as we are living with adverse climate change,” he said, drawing comparisons with drought-hit California.
“They are not appealing (for funds) because they have the capacity to respond. We expect Ethiopia to have such capacity to respond by itself… when we reach lower middle-income (status),” he said, a target it has set for 2025.
(Addis Fortune) — Ethiopia’s foreign currency supply available for importers and travellers alike is increasingly facing chronic shortages, claims an importer engaged in trading of household appliances from Asian countries, while opting to speak to Fortune on conditions of anonymity. As the country’s foreign exchange provision plummets into a whirlpool, the parallel or black market for hard foreign currency (which has become a rare commodity), is thriving in the country.
The forex shortage is so critical that opening a Letter of Credit (LC) takes as long as one year or even more, and even then, there is no guarantee that the requested amount of foreign currency will be availed, the importer complained.
His is not the sole voice of concern with the increasing scarcity of foreign currency in Ethiopia, as his view is also shared by a senior executive of a private bank and an economics lecturer, who also chose to speak anonymously to Fortune. They argue that basic economic principles of supply and demand suffice to explain the ongoing critical shortfall of forex in Ethiopia.
Both the banker and economist posited three basic factors: global economic slowdown, Ethiopia’s mega projects consuming huge loads of hard currency and the country’s widening trade balance, as the genesis of the shortage.
As the world still reels from the financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent global economic slowdown, it has negatively affected and upset long term foreign investment in the country, the banker and economist argued. However, a recent study by the United Nations Conference on Trade & Development (UNCTAD) discovered that Ethiopia is actually the third largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa, with inflows of 953 million dollars in 2014 and 279 million dollars in 2013, highlighting a rapidly rising trend.
Ethiopia’s mega projects in hydroelectric generation, sugar production, and rail transport, continue to drain the country’s hard currency reserves, with high demand for public investment, the experts argued. Import of capital goods and construction-related services increased sharply in Ethiopia according to a June 2015 IMF report, utilising large sums of hard currency.
In line with the country’s development endeavours, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) has a policy of prioritising provision of foreign exchange for selected goods and services based on a designated priority, which shuns other imports, the banker explained. The mega projects top the priority list and drain the country’s forex reserves.
In addition to the impact of the country’s mega projects taking a rather large chunk of the highly limited forex reserve, Ethiopia’s trade balance is also one of the major factors affecting the availability of hard currency.
Though Ethiopia’s exports have registered growth over the past years, the growth rate of its imports has been at a much faster pace, resulting in an ever widening gap in the overall trade balance of the country.
Reports by NBE indicate that though the country’s export trade has been registering steady growth in the recent past, with exports worth roughly two billion dollars in 2009/10, increased to 3.25 billion dollars in 2013/14 and more than 1.6 billion dollars in the first two quarters of the current fiscal year, the country’s imports have skyrocketed at an alarming rate.
NBE’s data show that Ethiopia’s imports have maintained a robust course of growth over the years as the country imported goods worth roughly 8.27 billion dollars in 2009/10, increased to 13.72 billion dollars in 2013/14 and well over eight billion dollars in the first two quarters of the current fiscal year.
The national bank’s data also highlight the distressingly widening trade imbalance which continues to haunt Ethiopia’s balance of trade. As such, the trade deficit was put at an estimated -6.27 billion dollars in 2009/10, -10.47 billion dollars in 2013/14 and roughly -6.6 billion dollars for only the first two quarters of 2015.
This imbalance has partly been caused as a result of slow-evolving export growth rates with falling commodity prices and lack of diversification in exports, loopholes underscored by the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) report.
But beyond the basic economic principles of demand and supply used as tools to explain the shortage of forex, other variables are worth exploring to get the picture of the problem in its entirety.
One important aspect is the proliferation of the black market and shady business deals between businesspeople and bankers. As anxious importers are willing to pay whatever cost they are made to pay to avoid penalties during delivery of imported goods, and as some corrupt bank staff and managers take advantage of the situation, the forex shortage has worsened.
Fortune spoke to a dealer, who, on conditions of anonymity, explained some of the processes in which brokers, importers, exporters and bankers engage, to facilitate the provision of forex at a faster time interval than normal. He stated that the deals take place underground but strictly follow legal procedural steps. This makes the whole process virtually undetectable by regulations of the national bank.
At the current going rate, a person who wants to get forex ahead of the pack, has to pay as much as three Birr for every dollar they request in their LC, the dealer told Fortune. His job is to bring together the bankers and the importers and the deal will be done. He also explained a different, still illegal, mode of acquiring forex employed in the context of secret partnerships between corrupt importers, exporters and bankers.
In this case, the dealer negotiates a proposal between an exporter and an importer where the latter will make use of the export earnings of the former, by paying the current going rate for every dollar used. The dealer once again negotiates the proposed scheme with the bankers and once on board, they jointly facilitate the importers’ access to hard currency.
The lack of transparency in opening LCs has cast an ominous shadow on the industry, according to several importers and the banker who spoke with Fortune. NBE recently took a highly publicised measure against the Cooperative Bank of Oromia for alleged mishandling of forex involving LCs.
One importer noted that a growing number of suppliers in Asia are now rejecting LCs opened in certain banks from Ethiopia, due to unpaid credits, emboldening his opinion that unless the regulatory state apparatus takes a serious overhaul at the forex provision, darker days are yet to come.
Travellers are also feeling the brunt of the forex crunch. As one traveller put it, she considers herself lucky if she can get 500 dollars from banks for a travel visa. The chronic shortage, she adds, has fed the parallel market for forex and its proportions and ramifications on the country’s economy are growing daily.
The CIA’s Factbook showed Ethiopia’s reserve of foreign exchange and gold was 3.785 billion dollars at the end of 2014. International financial institutions such as IMF have stated that they support the national bank’s objective of having foreign exchange reserves to cover three months of imports – but the central bank has so far, failed to respond to any of the questions Fortune had regarding the overall forex shortage in the country, including the state of forex reserves.
In addition to racking up the reserves, NBE should proactively counter all the shady business deals now widespread in the banking sector to cut the business community and the overall economy of the country, some slack.
Related:-
Ethiopia: The chronic shortage economy: What is the price and utility of a kilo of Sugar in Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in terms of never ending queue?
“The mood within the power circle is one of relaxation…One can hardly find the sense of urgency expected…The response system remains fragmented. There is no functioning integration between risk assessment units, response institutions, local administrations and federal level units… The whole response system seems to host great inefficiency”[16].
The credo was: the country has its own capacity to deal with the crisis; the government has enough food stock[7]. Redwan Hussein was categorical: “We are able to feed ourselves”.[8]The Prime Minister and Chairman of the ruling party, Haile Mariam Dessalegn, repeated such statements word by word[9].
But one month later, Redwan Hussein acknowledged that the recent rise in the number of victims calls for an urgent foreign assistance. “Although the government can tackle the problem by diverting the budget allocated for development, it needs international assistance so that the on-going pace of development would not be hampered”[10]. And even more: the government is now complaining that the donors “have already promised so much, but they have delivered practically nothing. The government is working alone”[11]. Even more: the government is now complaining that the donors “have already promised so much, but they have delivered practically nothing. The government is working alone”.
This provoked strong reactions. “Enough is enough… It is embarrassing and humiliating indeed to observe our smartly dressed leaders scuttling from one donor meeting into another with their begging bowls… It surely should not be beyond Ethiopia’s capacity to handle minor droughts without the necessity for the degrading foreign aid… By running to the UN for help, the EPRDF – the ruling party – has gravely injured the positive image of the country”[12].
The designated culprit is the drought, attributed to the climatic El Nino phenomena. Meteorological experts have confirmed it is the worst in the last two or three decades. However, this kind of crisis is recurrent. The sequence of bad rain seasons leading to bad harvests leading to a food crisis is unstoppable in a country where 98% of the agriculture remains rain fed.
It is highly probable that sooner or later TV screens will show us crying children with emaciated faces and balloon stomachs. The viewers will be convinced that once more famine and Ethiopia form a diabolical duo[13]. But there is always and at any time at least one place in Ethiopia where a camera could catch such a worrying scene. Does it mean that Ethiopia’s old evils have once again risen to the surface?
First, the apocalyptical famines of 1972-73 and 1984-85 left hundreds thousands of deaths, probably around 200,000 and 400,000 respectively. Now, whether real famine pockets have developed here and there remains to be seen – usually the stage of famine is considered reached when a significant number of adults start to die from hunger. In any case the possible death toll would have nothing to do with these previous figures.
Second, the official growth of the cereals production, and therefore the agricultural development action of the government are rightly the subject of enquiry. Last year, the official figure for the cereals’ harvest has been 27 million of tons for a population close to 100 million, that is to say 270 kg/person/year. Even with a high range estimate of post-harvest losses and reserve of future seeds, this left a per person consumption availability of basic food well above the required 180 kilo per year. Given these figures, Ethiopia should be overflowing with locally available surpluses.
The food market prices have remained relatively stable, and within the range of the global inflation. For example, the wholesale price of sorghum and maize in Addis Ababa are stable compared to one year ago, wheat has increased by 7% and decreased by 3% since its summer peak, teff, the most locally prized cereal, has increased by 13%[14]. But one should be aware that during former similar crises, the crops inflation started at the beginning of the following year.
But in any case, to attribute food shortages to a shortfall in the whole agricultural production cycle is misleading.
At least half of the Ethiopian farmers are net buyers of their own household food consumption thanks to extra-farm incomes. In bad years, their production drops, and they would need more money to respond to their needs. But bad years also mean less agricultural daily labour, well less paid, while this represents usually the main source of cash for the poorest. Thus, they face a food shortage not because the market is lacking, but because they cannot afford to buy it. Thus, they face a food shortage not because the market is lacking, but because they cannot afford to buy it. Amartya Sen has perfectly demonstrated this mechanism for the 1943 Bengal famine in India.
Third, the early warning systems have operated relatively properly, even if they need to be improved, after having been launched more than a decade ago.
Fourth, the so-called biblical famines of 1972-73 and 1984-85 were deliberately hidden so as to preserve the image of the imperial regime or of the Derg military junta. Even more recently, in 2008-2009, both the authorities and the donor community publicly denied the acuteness of the food crisis for three to four months, thus leading to a corresponding delay in the aid delivery.[15] Again, the reaction of the authorities is under strong criticism here and there. “The mood within the power circle is one of relaxation…One can hardly find the sense of urgency expected…The response system remains fragmented. There is no functioning integration between risk assessment units, response institutions, local administrations and federal level units… The whole response system seems to host great inefficiency”[16].
Interviewed under conditions of anonymity
International experts who deal with food crisis year on year don’t share this point of view, even when they go off the record and far from being apologists of the regime. Their general opinion is that the government has efficiently performed vis-à-vis the crisis, both in terms of volume and organisation. Aid officials and NGO’s leaders, interviewed under conditions of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue for the authorities, reached the same conclusion[17].
For them, the authorities have reacted faster and more vigorously than during any of the previous crisis. Above all, their level of assistance is beyond comparison with those of the past. For the first time, they have drawn on the national and regional budgets to put on the table first a tiny 33 million US dollars, second around 200 millions of the 600 million needed at that time, and just now an additional 97 million[18].
This represents around 3% of the whole budget, and 9% of the investment budget. Haile Mariam Dessalegn travelled to the affected areas in the Somali region at the end of October, and almost all regional high officials also did this. The concerned state departments are fully mobilized, including and even more in the regions. When the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Ethiopia said that “the leadership and commitment of the government in driving its response to the impact of the El-Nino phenomenon on food security in affected areas has been exceptional“[19], this statement is not only diplomatically motivated. When Addis Standard writes: “The trend of not admitting on time to a looming drought hasn’t improved over the last four decades since 1974”[20] – the weekly is wrong.
It is obvious that the ruling power does not want the age-old dramatic images of starvation and the dead aired again all over the world. Reports have proven that, at least locally, a lot is done to hide the drama and even to silence the victims[21]. But trying to minimize the publicity about the food shortages, which the authorities do with a patent clumsiness, must not be mixed up with trying to withhold information of a crisis.
Fifth, the worst is highly probably to come. There is no doubt that the summer rains season in many parts of the highlands were insufficient and erratic, including in some of the most productive areas, and that the main harvest has been affected as a result. The crisis can only deepen until at best the small spring harvest and, more possibly the main production next autumn.
Controlling the crisis
Now the key question is: facing unprecedented growing needs, could the authorities – and the donors – continue to upgrade their response capacities, and thus maintain the crisis under control? Now the key question is: facing unprecedented growing needs, could the authorities – and the donors – continue to upgrade their response capacities, and thus maintain the crisis under control?
Some argue that the latter seem now to have reached their limits. The State Minister for Agriculture and Secretary of the National Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee Mitiku Kassa stated: “You can build resilience, but when conditions are bad enough, so severe – and we’re seeing the perfect storm – these resilience systems are overawed”. He added: “The international community is not in a position to respond to our crisis”[22].
200,000 tons of food are on their way to Ethiopia. 600,000 tons have just been ordered. A bid for one million tons will soon be called for. The aim is not only to feed the starving people, but also to prevent a sky-rocketing in food prizes.
Where could the money come from to buy on the international market? First, Ethiopia’s lack of foreign currencies is chronic. It seems the World Bank and the African Development Bank are willing to give a hand. But other donors are more reluctant, and some of them even condition their further financial effort on the same move by the Ethiopian government.
The minimum delay between a bid and the effective distribution of the food at a village level is five months. The only solution to feel the gap in between is to dip into the available local reserves. But again: who will pay? At this stage, some donor organizations will be short of food to distribute in January in some areas.
Finally, the logistic bottlenecks. Most of the importation of Ethiopia transits through Djibouti port. It manages usually around 500,000 tons per month. Can it deal with an additional 2 million tons, and with what kinds of delay?
Sixth, Ethiopia is expected to become a middle level income country in 2025. Could the continuous foreseen growth of the Ethiopian economy, including the agricultural sector, progressively absorb these perennial food crises? The answer looks rather grim.
First, the cereal production has officially tripled during the last fifteen years. Even if this figures is highly questionable, the per capita production has substantially increased for sure. But the percentage of people suffering from the droughts has remained stable: around 20% in 2001-2002, around 15% in 2007-2008, around 20% now. “The poorest 15 percent of the population experienced a decline in well-being in 2005-11 mainly as a result of high food prices ».[23] “Graduation from the Safety Net Program has been short of expectation”[24].
The number of people who succeeded in increasing their assets enough to live without perennial aid has not exceeded a small percentage. So the hard core of the poorest farmers, the food insecure people, chronically vulnerable to any climate shock, has not been significantly alleviated.
Prospects
The present agricultural development policy does not seem to be appropriate to reverse this trend. At the grass roots level, when asked why this hard core of poverty remains, and even extends, the local authorities and development agents respond: “because these farmers do not follow our development advice”. When asked why they cannot escape from poverty, these poor farmers reply: “because the development programme does not fit our needs and means”. Actually, it looks like they are left to their fate.
They even start to complain that a kind of implicit alliance has been formed between the local authorities and the most enterprising farmers – the so called “model farmers” – to endorse this neglect. The former focus their efforts on the latter because they can boast of having better results to their superiors. The latter are the only ones who can rent a land from a poor farmer who is obliged to do so because he is engulfed in a debt spiral when any shock occurs.
The government seems to have validated this status quo. The draft of the Growth and Transformation Plan for 2015/16-2019/20 devotes few words to this destitute hard core. It mentions “strengthening the Productive Safety Net Program” and “providing effective credit facilities and other supplementary and complementary programs… to accelerate the graduation of Programme beneficiaries”[25].
But it looks like it doubts itself whether any of these actions would succeed: the food reserve for Food Security, Disaster Prevention and Preparedness, would have to be raised from 400,000 tons now to 3 million tons, which could be reduced to a little bit to more than one million tons in the finalised Plan[26].
Finally, the same scapegoat is selected as always. “The right to ownership of rural and urban land… is exclusively vested in the State and in the peoples of Ethiopia”, states the Constitution. Thus, the land tenure system, because it forbids sales, leases and mortgages, because it allows eviction for public interests, would be the main culprit for low production and thus for the food shortages in case of crisis. The only solution would be privatisation. But the land tenure security is now largely assured through the new 30 years land certificates. De facto, a mechanism of leasing has been put in place which allows land to be rented for cash or through a share cropping agreement. Privatisation would worsen the situation of the poorest farmers.
In the case of drought, they inevitably fall in debt. If a land market existed, their only choice would be to sell their last asset, their land, with very few possibilities of being employed either locally or in the urban areas, because the available workforce outnumbers the needs. They would simply join the growing rural lumpen proletariat – who is precisely the main food aid seeker.
Ethiopia: Ongoing Drought in Ethiopia Being Hushed By Its Own Government
A Call to Take Responsibility: Exiled Ethiopian human rights advocate Yared Hailemariam, who is based in Brussels, speculates on why the government denies that the drought has turned into a famine. It is his opinion that the denial is due to a lack of competent governance, democracy, social justice and political will of the last three regime’s. He also says that the EPRDF (The Government of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front) is highly corrupt, and that the development is not what it seems to be.
– The so called development is not humanitarian based – rather it is based on numbers and the economic aspect, but there is still lots of confusion regarding the double digit growth that has been reported to us over the last few years.
ANALYSIS By Fasil Girma, http://allafrica.com/
Birtukan Ali, a woman living in a rural district in Ethiopia, became a sensation following BBC’s report about the ongoing drought and famine. Thereport, which aired on November 10 2015, sparked a new kind of debate on the government’s intention in trying to cover up the famine – a story that remains untold.
Journalist Clive Myrie featured the story of Birtukan Ali who is from a small village called “Kobo” which is located in the North East of Ethiopia. It is a place where the drought is widespread and the effect of it is highly visible. Birtukan told the reporter that her son recently died due to severe malnutrition as a result of the drought in the area. The reporter said that at least two children die in similar cases daily.
The drought, brought on by the El Niño, a weather phenomenon described as a periodic warming of the sea surface, has severely affected the country. Ethiopia is mainly an agrarian economy and the agriculture is fully dependant on rain fall. Ultimately this means that no rain results in no crops, and therefore no food. This year the rainfall was inadequate to cultivate crops for two consecutive seasons. The United Nations estimated that 8.2 million people in Ethiopia’s drought affected areas need relief assistance. UNICEF said that the drought is expected to be the worst in 30 years and that 350,000 children are expected to require treatment for extreme malnutrition.
Ethiopian Government Denies Famine
In a press release by the World Food Program, it is stated that “a dramatic increase in the number of people in need of relief assistance, from 2.5 million at the beginning of the year to 8.2 million in October, led to a serious funding gap”. The Ethiopian government says that it has allocated $192 million USD for emergency food and other assistance.
However, the government and humanitarian agencies have said that Ethiopia needs nearly $600 million USD in international humanitarian assistance. The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, has called for international assistance by appealing for food aid to help feed the 8.2 million people that are affected by the drought.
Nevertheless, at the same time, his government denies that there is a famine at all. Deputy Prime Minister, Demeke Mekonen, commented on the BBC report in an interview with a local journalist:
– It is obvious that the foreign media works with different bodies of special interest. There is no such thing as famine in Ethiopia these days, Demeke said.
Similarly, the Ethiopian embassy in the United Kingdom has condemned the BBC report as being “sensational”. The embassy denied reports of approximately two children dying from malnutrition in the area on a daily basis.
Five days after the airing of the BBC’ program, government owned Amhara Mass Media Agency, which is based in Bahar-Dar, the capital of the regional state Amhara, presented a televised program that ridiculed BBC’s report. The program includes Birtukan’s interview with the regional media. This time, however, Birtukan claims that her son died of unspecified “sudden illnesses” and not because of the malnutrition as she had told the BBC reporter.
Felanemunemunim, a local journalist and social media activist who is mentioned by his nickname, followed the news on Ethiopian television. He says that regional governors report as if the agriculture is good enough to produce plenty of food.
– They were talking about it on television for more than four months, but the truth is as BBC reported, even if there was exaggeration.
Government Accused of Diminishing the Extent of the Famine
The statements made by the Ethiopian government have sparked a debate among Ethiopian human rights activists. According to them, the government is trying to cover up the severe effects of the drought.
Argaw Ashine, an exiled journalist based in USA and founder of the web based Amharic internet radio Wazema, which is getting a wide acceptance in the Ethiopian online community for its credible information, commented on the drought. According to him, it is obvious that the Ethiopian government continues to hide the drought from the media, and he believes that they will continue to do so despite the United Nations and others predicting that the worst is yet to come. Admitting that there is a famine would create a problem for the Ethiopian government.
– It costs them politically. The success story they fed to Ethiopians and the international community falls severely short after an exposition of the hunger.
Wazema radio reports that the federal government passes strict instructions to regional governments and Ethiopian embassies all over the world to not give any kind of information to any media regarding the ongoing drought and famine. The instructions include denying access for all journalists to drought affected areas and to take necessary measures for nongovernmental organizations to not leak information regarding the crises to the media.
According to Argaw, media restriction is common during humanitarian crises, and specifically the local media is blocked from reporting the situation.
– They may allow some big international media organizations in to specific locations for only a couple of days. International media reporting is part of convincing the international community to send aid, yet the government does not want an in-depth report on the cause of the problem.
– Authoritarian governments are good at controlling the information flow, and the role of media during crises in Ethiopia is kept at a minimum. Media should be at the forefront to end hunger. Development and better life is impossible without vibrant media in Ethiopia, Argaw said.
A Call to Take Responsibility
Exiled Ethiopian human rights advocate Yared Hailemariam, who is based in Brussels, speculates on why the government denies that the drought has turned into a famine. It is his opinion that the denial is due to a lack of competent governance, democracy, social justice and political will of the last three regime’s. He also says that the EPRDF (The Government of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front) is highly corrupt, and that the development is not what it seems to be.
– The so called development is not humanitarian based – rather it is based on numbers and the economic aspect, but there is still lots of confusion regarding the double digit growth that has been reported to us over the last few years.
Yared says that the first thing the government should do is to rescue those in need. The level of the ongoing and upcoming disaster that would take many lives, needs to be reduced. It is also important to take lessons from the past.
Erga guyyaatti 3 ol nyaanna jedhamee Wayyaaneedhaan hololamu eegalee waggoottan 24 darbaniiru. Muummicha ministeeraa wayyaanee kan ture Mallas Zeenaawiirraa eegalee hanga ergamticha har’aa H/Maariyaam Dassaalanyitti guddinarratti guddinni ida’amee, parsantii 11 oliin gudataa jirra jedhamee afarfamaa tureera. Guddinnii fi dhaadannoon waggoottan 24 darbaniif hololamaa ture garuu kunoo dhadhaa abidda bu’e ta’ee hafe. Guddinni gaafa afaan qawweetiin haangottii dhufan irraa eegalanii hololaa turan as buuteen isaa dhabamee ummattoonni biyyattii beelaan mankaraaraa jiru. Impaayeera Itiyoophiyaa keessatti beellii fi gadadaoon babalatee namni miliyoona .15 ol ta’u kan afaaniin qabatee bulu hin qabu. Inni guyyaatti 3 fi sanaa ol nyaata jedhame takkaa dhabee beelaa fi dheebuun harcahaa jira.
Dhugaadha miseensoonni Wayyaanee fi lukkeeleen sirnichaa saamicha fi malaanmaltummaa afaan qawweetiin gaggeessaniin quufanii bulaa jiru.
Ethiopia ‘using aid as a political tool’.
BBC report alleges the government is withholding aidfrom opposition supporters and committing human right abuses
Duroomanii midhaan filatanii nyaatu, wuskii bakka dhaqanitti dhangalaasu,ciree Finfinneetti yoo nyaatan dhayanni isaanii Awuroopaa ta’uu danda’a. Abbaa fooqii hedduutii, makiinaa akka kaalsii miilaatti guyyaa guyyaan jijjiirratu. Warshaaleen biyyattii keessa jiran kan isaaniti. Ummattoonni cunqursaa fi saamicha sirnichaa jala jiran miliyoona 15ni olitti tilmaaman garuu beelaan harcahaa jiru. Qayee fi qabeenyarraa buqqawaa jiru. Biyyaa baqatanii gammoojjii biyya ormaa fi galaanatti dhumaa jiru.Mootummaan Wayyaanee mootummaa gama hedduun ummattoota Impaayeera Itiyoophiyaa keessa jiran, keessumaawuu ummata Oromoo addatti irratti xiyyeeffatee fixaa jiruu dha. Murni saamichaaf umame kun gama tokkoon nama mirga isaa fi lammii isaatiif falme; barattoota qalama malee harkaa hin qabnee dabalatee, sabboontoota rasaasaan karaarratti fixaa jira. Kaan mana hidhaatti guuree, kaan ammoo qayee fi qabeenyarraa buqqisee, carraa hojii fi barnootaa dhorkatee mankaraarsaa jira, biyya dhablee taasisuun kan biyyaa baqachiisee gammoojjii, galaanaa fi kaampii baqattaatti fixes manni haa lakkaawu. Haacaaluu ammoo kunoo amma nama miliyoona 15 ol beeleessee kadhaa fi du’aaf saaxilee jira.
walumaa galattii ummattoonni biyyattii keessumaa Oromoon beelaan, baqaan, rasaasaan , hidhaan goolamaa fi dhumaa jira jechuutu hundarra salphata.
Murni Wayyaanee karaa adda addaan beela nama mil 15 ol miidhaa jiru kana dhoksuuf yaaluus, yeroo kaan ammoo lakkoofsa isaa gadi buusee himuuf carraaqus namni dhumaa, abdiin qotee bulaa fi horsiisee bulaa beeladoonni karraan harcahaa jiru. Akka BBC fi AL-JAZIRA dabalatee miidiyaaleen idil addunyaa hedduu fi dhaabooleen gargaarsaa adda addaa yeroo ammaa kana ifa taasisaa jiranitti impaayeera Itiyoophiyaa Wayyaaneedhaan bulaa jirtu keessatti beelli namoota mili. 15 ol , kan irra jiraan isaa saba Oromoo ta’e akka malee hubaa, lubbuu baasaa jira.
Despite its higher severity in terms of intensity and magnitude as compared to similar humanitarian crises in recent time, the current hunger in Ethiopia doesn’t receive adequate response yet from national and international aid organizations. Though good news are coming about bilateral aid support from U.S and certain EU members, the INGOs which have got ample experience in the area of humanitarian responses in the country are either still on the stage of preparation or did not yet plan to respond. The irresponsible position of the ruling party-EPRDF – that claimed the drought would not be beyond government capacity- might have contributed for the late and/ or no response acts of the aid organizations.
Moreover, Aid organizations become more curious about their mandate/roles and forced to operate under strict precaution (even in the case of emergency interventions) since the new civil society law enacted in the year 2009- that explicitly prohibited them to undertake any right based projects. The critical question usually asked by the practitioners goes, “is there any thing as such which can not be a right in the development endeavor? be it education, livelihood, economic empowerment or emergency food support?”. The ruling elites have never wanted to properly address such confusions emanated from their notorious enactment, as their main intention is to narrow dawn the space of civil society in Ethiopia’s political engagements.
Whatever the reasons, the emergency response support to millions who are severely affected by the disaster is already delaying. The results of such irresponsible acts might claim the lives of the vulnerable groups, if the trend continues so. The internationally accepted “Humanitarian” principles and standards are being compromised in Ethiopia due political irresponsibility in the ruling elites and lack of adequate sensitivity in the aid sector. The hunger incident has already severely affected the life of 15 million people through putting at least six regional states in “red level” hot spot situation. Oromia regional state having more than 125 most affected districts is leading in the humanitarian crisis. It should be noted that the recurrent drought crisis is proportionally shifting to South of the country during the recent incidents.
The claimed “food aid” through various government owned mechanisms do not address the need of all affected communities fairly and equally mainly due to autocratic political acts. The target community/ localities that showed their support to opposition forces during the recent national election 2015, for instant, would be discriminated by blind cadres during such government based aid support. Denial of such food aid-humanitarian support- to certain severely affected households due to failing to pay membership fee for OPDO- ruling party in Oromia region- was also observed in some areas.
Thus, alternative emergency response interventions should be in placed immediately. The Aid Organizations (INGOs) and other national civil society organizations as well as the entire community should act now, irrespective the prevailing political and bureaucratic challenges.
Related:-
SBO – Sadaasa 22, 2015. Oduu, Qophii Beelaa, Dhimmoota Adda Addaa Irratti Gaaffii fi Deebii Namoota Gara Garaa Waliin Taasifamee fi Qophiilee Biroo
Waan dubartiin san gaazexeessitootattii himtee keysaa akkana jatteen “Nuti hoongeen nuttii hammattee jirtii. Namnii goodanaa jiraa. Anuu ammaa goodansafiin demaa. Edaa edaatuu hiraata osoon hin nyatiniin bulee. Gargaarsi yeroo dhufe mallaqaa kaffalleeti katabamnaa. Abbaan araddaa maallaqa nurraa guurrateeti nu galmeeysaa. Qarshii san kan beeyladaa qabu horii gargureetii ittii kannaa. Walumaagalatti kan qarshii dhibbaa 300 hin qabnee gargaarsa kana hin fudhatu. Gargarsii osoo ummata hoongeen miidhame biraa hin geenye namootuma muraasaaf hiramee dhuma. Gargarsi aanaa keenyaa kan caasaalee araddaatifi kanuma nama qabenyaa qabuu tahe.” jattee icitii silaa isaan dhoysuu barbadaan mara jalaa bafte.
Galgaluma san TV Oromiyaa sagantaa kana dabarsee ture. Garuu kan nama aja’ibsisuu gazaxessooni kun waan intaltii dhala san ittii himtee hin dabarsine. Kan isaan dabarsan “rakkoo beelaa hin qabnuu tan nuti qabnu rakkoo bishaan dhugatiiti” tan jattu dabarsan. Kanaas kan ja’e nama bulchaan aanaa qopheesseen kan dubbatamee dha. Wanni nama gaddisiisu garuu bulchaan ummata bulchaa jiru kun ummata moo mootummaaf akka dhaabbateedha. Sagaleen ummataa ukkamamtee ummanni beelaan dhumaa jiraachuun kun akkamitti xiqqolee garaa isaan hin nyaanne jechuun ummanni bal’aan kaabinoota aanaa komachaa jiran.
Akka odeeffannoon gara Miidhagaa Lolaatii arra nu gahe tokko ibsitutti, hoongeefi beelaan wal qabatee haalli amma naannoo sanitti argamuu akka malee yaaddeessaa tahuu irraa kan ka’e abaar akka baroota dheeraa dura naannoo sanii namoota kumaatamaan baqachiisee turee san daran tahuun shakkisiisaa jira ja’an. Gargaarsi waajibir naannoo san dhufaa jiruus kan kallattiin ummata bira gahaa jiru osoo hin taane kan aangawoota araddaafi nama qarshii qabuu qofa akka tahe ijaan agartoonni naannoo sanii himaa jiran.
Haaluma wal fakkaatuun aanaalee walakkaan horsiifatee bultootaa tahan kan akka Qumbii, Mayyumuluqqee, Gola Odaa, Baabbile, Gursumiifi Cinaaksaniis beeyladaan isaani margaaf bishaan dhabaaf jalaa dhumaa kan jirtuufi ummanniis haala yaaddeessaa taheen beelaan xuruurfamaa jiraachuufi gargaarsi dhufu eessa akka gahu wanni beekan akka hin jirre odeeffannooleen garasii nu dhaqqabaa jiru ni hima.
Alarm bells are ringing for a food emergency in Ethiopia. The UN says 15 million people will need help over the coming months. The government, wary of stigma and therefore hesitant to ask for help, has nevertheless said more than eight million Ethiopians need food assistance. Extra imports to stem the crisis are already pegged at more than a million tonnes of grain, beyond the government’s means. Inevitably, comment and media coverage compare the current situation with 1984 – the year Ethiopia’s notorious famine hit the headlines. Reports suggest this is the worst drought in 30 years. One declares it a“code red” drought. So how bad actually is it?
The country of close to 100 million people is huge, spread over an area of more than a million square kilometres that ranges from semi-desert to swamp to mountain ranges and fertile farmland. The weather systems and agricultural patterns are diverse and complex. Even within the higher-altitude areas of the country, the most densely populated, the typical rainy seasons vary and crops are grown at different times of the year. This year, the weather has been prone to even greater variation due to the global climate phenomenon El Niño, last seen in 1997-1998.
Ethiopia produces more than 90 percent of its own food. Last year, the cereal harvest was estimated to be 23 million tonnes, but imports in recent years averaged 1.2 million tonnes – just five percent of that. So even if 2015 and 2016 are bad years (the impact of a poor harvest is felt months later as food stocks run out), the vast majority of Ethiopian people will support themselves and eat produce from their own country. But in a giant like Ethiopia, 15 percent of the population is 15 million people – more than the entire humanitarian caseload of the Syrian crisis. An extra five percent of cereals is another 1.2 million tonnes.The costs and logistics become formidable at this scale.
WEATHER
The weather is only one part of the equation in whether people go hungry. Politics, economics, the availability of seeds and fertiliser, conflict, trade and labour markets, population pressure, social habits, and a host of other factors matter too.
While the science and sociology of food security is complex and layered, international agencies working on drought and hunger-prone countries, including Ethiopia, use a scheme called the Integrated Food Security and Humanitarian Phase Classification Framework (IPC) to simplify the mass of underlying data into a five-step scale – from minimal food security pressure to famine. Some parts of northern Ethiopia are already flagged as being in “Phase 4”, one step from the worst category. More are expected to follow, unless sufficient resources can halt the slide.
Even getting a single view of one year’s weather, let alone human interaction with it, is no simple matter.
For more than 30 years, meteorologists have gathered a giant archive of satellite data for Ethiopia. US satellites, in particular METOP-AVHRR, churn out petabytes of data. Triangulating that with other sources, including ground-based measurement, farm assessments, nutrition, and price monitoring provides a rich toolkit to estimate vegetation, rainfall, soil moisture and temperature – ultimately giving an idea of food on the table.
Considering all the variables, the drought and famine watchdog FEWS NET, established in the wake of the 1984 famine, has used direct, but not alarmist, language to describe the prospects: its latest report for Ethiopia is titled “Large-scale food security emergency projected for 2016”. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, meanwhile, warned: “food security conditions sharply deteriorated.”
Political sensitivity, donor pressures, logistics, media distortion, inefficiency and scepticism may yet conspire to tip more Ethiopians into “Phase 4.” Even in the best-case scenario, the financial resources will be hard to find – $270m is still needed for 2015 alone, according to UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, and needs are set to rise sharply (the US, the UK and China have pledged relatively early to the response, according to the government).
To illustrate the complexity of weather patterns in Ethiopia and attempt to demonstrate a link with El Niño, IRIN analysed 30 years of satellite imagery to provide some visual evidence of the complex and erratic picture of weather in the Horn of Africa. Read more in the following link
(UN News Centre): With Ethiopia experiencing its worst drought in decades the United Nations is reporting deepening food insecurity and “severe emaciation and unusual livestock deaths” as the Organization’s humanitarian wing has allocated $17 million in emergency funding to help the Government tackle climate challenges and ensure timely food relief.
A recent report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that severe drought, driven by the El Niño phenomenon, has not only caused livestock deaths especially in pastoral areas, but it has also deteriorated food security conditions in recent months, as food insecure people have almost doubled from August to October this year.
While cereal prices dropped last month thanks to the carryover stocks from previous year, the report also indicated the soaring prices of dairy and vegetables, as a result of food inflation.
Meanwhile, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) allocated $17 million last week from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), aiming to reach those in the areas hard-hit by the drought with immediate food assistance and relief.
“A timely response to the emergency is critical,” said Stephen O’Brien, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, warning that “if we don’t act today, we face an even graver situation tomorrow, with more immense needs in 2016.”
This emergency funding will be provided to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), for supporting some 1.37 million Ethiopians with food, and providing specialized nutritional supplements to 164,000 malnourished women and children.
Some 8.2 million people currently need emergency food assistance – up almost 3 times compared to last year – and the number will likely double at the start of 2016, according to the Ethiopian Government.
The CERF pools donor contributions in a single fund so that money is available to start or continue urgent relief work anywhere in the world. Since its inception in 2006, 125 UN Member States and dozens of private-sector donors and regional Governments have contributed to the Fund. In 2015, CERF has allocated over $27 million to support humanitarian operations in Ethiopia.
Related:-
WHO warning over Ethiopia climate change risks
THE HEALTH BODY HAS SAID THAT CLIMATE CHANGE COULD WORSEN HEALTH PROBLEMS IN AFRICAN COUNTRY.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that climate change is threatening to exacerbate health problems in Ethiopia.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning that climate change is threatening to exacerbate health problems in Ethiopia.
The WHO released details in its Climate and Health Country Profile 2015 on Tuesday (17 November 2015).
“Increased temperatures, intense heat waves, more extreme rainfall, floods and landslides, are expected to intensify existing challenges of communicable diseases, food insecurity and poverty unless timely action is taken,” according to a WHO statement.
Ethiopia’s country profile is one of the first 15 country reports the WHO is releasing.
“Ethiopia is vulnerable to many of the effects of climate change, including increases in average temperature and changes in precipitation. This threatens health, livelihoods and the progress that Ethiopia has made in recent years,” the WHO added.
The international body claims that by 2030, almost 250,000 people in Ethiopia will be at risk from annual river floods.
WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said: “Our planet is losing its capacity to sustain human life in good health”. She called for “strong, flexible and resilient health systems” as a defense against the impact of climate change.
We have been sold this “Ethiopia rising” meme for years now. The Ethiopian government keeps projecting this narrative 24/7. State media have been preoccupied with plastering images of construction projects and GDP rates on the minds of citizens; and Global “Experts on Africa” have added the “Ethiopia rising” meme to their already existing “Africa rising” meme as well.
The “Ethiopia rising” meme has become pernicious in part because it is half-truth. Construction projects are indeed visibly “booming”. We can at least see the Addis Ababa light rail with our own eyes. Sophisticated international economists tell us the latest GDP figures as well. Local, Bole resident, developmental government minions and cadres echo these GDP figures too; along with their fellow traveler, foreign born drive by reporters who are mostly based in Addis Ababa; They go out on field missions on few occasions and believe new buildings and a new light rail in Addis Ababa is the same as development of an entire country of 94 million people.
For such people, their echo chamber is filled with the “Ethiopia rising” noise. As a result, “Ethiopia rising” is the answer to everything. They have been so primed with this meme that they might even answer the question “What is 1 + 1?” with “Ethiopia rising”. Ask them if bricks can be bread or if starving children can eat a train and they will have no answer. (Or maybe they’ll just answer you with “Ethiopia rising”)
In addition, Ethiopia is now facing yet another severe drought and looming famine catastrophe ; the worst it has seen in 30 years and estimated 15 million people will likely need food assistance in 2016. UNICEF figures indicate a 27% increase in the number of children treated for Severe Acute Malnutrition already; 197 woredas had measles outbreaks; 14,300 suspected and 11,700 confirmed measles cases so far. Once again, the international community has started its never ending task of feeding hungry Ethiopians who are failed by their own government; yet another evidence for why the “Ethiopia rising” meme remains half-truth, if not a complete lie.
The extent of lives lost due to the ongoing drought is an unknown know reality for the moment. The government has suppressed report on mortality rates. Although public health information is incomplete without such vital statistics, UNICEF’s situations reports on the current humanitarian crisis bear no mortality rates. Even zero deaths should be reported in well-respected information sources such as the UNICEF. But that’s not the case here. UNICEF seems to have adopted a position that says “If the government says there are no children who died of starvation, then there are not children who died of starvation”. Yet, one BBC report states “The United Nations say two babies are dying of starvation every day in one area”. However, the government insists “No one has died or displaced due to lack of food in the areas affected by the drought”.
Without vital information such as mortality rates from independent sources, given the extent of Ethiopia’s previous famine disasters, previous and current governments’ denial and cover up on the extent of such disasters, and in spite of the “Ethiopia rising” meme, it’s hard to tell how bad the situation is. It might even be comparable with the 1984 famine.
The EPRDF government officials are repeatedly denying the current famine that around fifteen million people are facing In Ethiopia. International media are busy reporting about the famine showing the pictures of emaciated children; the dead bodies of hundreds of animals and telling stories of mothers who lost their children due to starvation. It is funny to hear what the government officials say regarding the drought and famine that is causing the death of many people and animals. Some of the government officials are even accusing these media (BBC for example) that tried to showcase the extent of the problem to the world saying that they have sensationalized reports about the drought in Ethiopia.
The EPRDF leaders say Ethiopia is food self sufficient; needs no aid from outside. They say there is no problem, no famine, no drought and no death. Other time they say, there is drought in some parts of the country and it is under control. Still, they say, only very insignificant number of people (15 million people out of 90 million people) are affected by the drought. Oh, my God, how on earth they say that 15million people are very insignificant? These people are gone out of their mind; the life of a single person matters let alone the life of 15 million people.
Recently, we have learned that the government is building very modern houses with 154million birr for six retired EPRDF officials. What a paradox! People are dying because they have nothing to eat while the government is allocating all this money for building houses for its corrupt retired officials who have been amassing unimaginable wealth over the last two decades.
Why does this government likes denying the facts on the ground? Why is it they are hiding the famine? is it because it contradicts with their 11% economic growth for 10 consecutive years?Please, guys come to your sense, tell the world the truth about the scale of the problem; mobilize all the citizens and gather the resources needed to save the millions of people who are on the verge of death. At least for now, forget the politics and do the right thing-saving the lives of people should be given a priority.#Ethiopiafamine
Ironically, while Ethiopia is facing a hunger crisis and making urgent appeals for aid, tonnes of food are actually leaving the country. This illogical development is due to the fact that the regime in Addis has sold large tracts of arable land to a range of foreign investors and corporations in transactions described as “land grabs.” The process also involves “villagization,” a government-led program which entails the forcible relocation of indigenous communities from locations reserved for large, foreign-owned plantations. Reports by rights groups list a plethora of human rights violations, including murders, beatings, rapes, imprisonment, intimidation, and political coercion by the government and authorities. A report by the Oakland Institute (OI), a prominent international human rights organization, vividly describes how via “strongarm tactics reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, the Ethiopian regime has moved tens of thousands of people against their will to purpose-built communes that have inadequate food and lack health and education facilities to make way for large, foreign-owned commercial agricultural projects.” Notably, the program has also led to food insecurity, a destruction of livelihoods and the loss of cultural heritage of ethnic groups.
Food insecurity is one of the most pressing humanitarian issues in the Horn of Africa, and the situation is expected to deteriorate further over the coming months. Ethiopia, in particular, is faced with a massive crisis. According to the European Commission, “the situation in Ethiopia is at present the most alarming, where the number of food insecure people has increased from 2.9 million at the beginning of the year to 8.2 million by early October. It is foreseen that these numbers will further rise up to 15 million by the end of 2015. Rates of acute under-nutrition are well above emergency thresholds in many parts of the country, while the response to this situation is hampered by an important shortage of nutrition supplies. In the worst affected areas in the Northern, Central and Eastern regions of the country hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths are reported.” Moreover, UNICEF warns that a large number of those facing hunger will be children; approximately 5 million children will “require relief food assistance during the last quarter of 2015,” with hundreds of thousands urgently requiring treatment for acute severe malnutrition.
The crisis is largely being attributed to the El Niño weather phenomenon and the underperformance of two consecutive rainy seasons, which have combined to negatively affect the country’s agricultural harvest cycle. During the last two months, prolonged, erratic and insufficient rainfall has led to poor vegetation conditions in southern Ethiopia, and widespread drought, which has severely impacted ground conditions.
However, although environmental factors have been significant, it is important to examine the crisis within a broader framework. The roots of hunger are multidimensional and complex; beyond immediate environmental causes, hunger involves a variety of factors including, amongst others, socio-political and governance dynamics. According to scholar Tim Hitchcock, “famines aren’t about the lack of food in the world. They aren’t about the lack of aid. We know that the harvest is going to fail in Eastern Africa once every 12 to 15 years. If you have a working state and your harvest fails, you raise the cash and you buy food and ship it in, and you make sure it is distributed. You don’t allow people to starve.” In Ethiopia, “[hunger and] food insecurity stems from government failures in addressing major structural problems” (Siyoum, Hilhorst, and Van Uffelen 2012).
The European Union (EU) has provided over €1 billion in humanitarian aid to the Horn of Africa since 2011, much of which has gone to Ethiopia. Annually, Ethiopia receives hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from a variety of bilateral and multilateral sources; across the 2004-2013 period, the country was the world’s 4thlargest recipient of foreign assistance, receiving nearly US$6 billion, while in 2011 alone, its share of total global official development assistance – approximately 4 percent – placed it behind only Afghanistan. However, even while it has long-been one of the leading recipients of foreign, humanitarian, and food aid in the world, the country continues to face crises. Why? One influential factor is the debilitating mix of domestic corruption and poor governance. According to prominent development scholar and international economist Dambisa Moyo (2009), aid is often closely linked to corruption and poor governance, and “aid flows destined to help the average African…[get] used for anything, save the developmental purpose for which they were intended.” Moreover, “a constant stream of ‘free’ money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power.” In the 1980s, during widespread famine and drought, Ethiopia’s brutal Dergue regime, led by Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam, diverted millions in humanitarian aid to the military, while under the despotic rule of Meles Zenawi, aid was frequently utilized as a political tool of manipulation and repression. Several months ago, leaked emails revealed that the Ethiopian regime, which is now making appeals for aid and external support, was paying the Italian surveillance firm, Hacking Team, to illegally monitor journalists critical of the government.
Corruption and poor governance remain deeply embedded within Ethiopia’s socio-political structure, and the country consistently scores extremely poorly on the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, especially within the areas of corruption, rule of law, and governance (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2010; World Bank 2014). The indicators, based upon a variety of perceptions-based data sources, provide measures for various states, with scores ranging from around –2.5 (low) to around 2.5 (high). Table 1 illustrates that corruption, rule of law, and governance are significant problems within Ethiopia.
Another area of considerable concern is democracy and civil liberties. Ethiopia has been consistently criticized by an array of international rights groups for its broad range of human rights abuses including its harsh repression of minorities and journalists, press censorship, draconian anti-terror laws that are utilized to silence all forms of dissent, and brutal crackdowns upon opposition groups and protestors.
According to the Polity IV Project (Marshall and Gurr 2013), which is widely used in international comparative analyses of democracy, governance, and human rights practices, Ethiopia is one of the most authoritarian, autocratic states in the world. The Polity IV Project codes the political characteristics of states, using an array of data sources, to rank states from –10, representing least democratic and most autocratic states, to 10, representing most democratic states. Table 2 displays that Ethiopia’s scores place it within the autocratic, authoritarian category. The applicability of this categorization is underscored by the fact that, mere months ago, the government in Addis Ababa won 100 percent of parliamentary seats in a widely discredited national election that involved massive irregularities and intimidation, crackdowns, and arrests of the opposition.
Importantly, scholars and analysts have pointed to the existence of an intricate relationship between democracy, civil liberty, and hunger or famine. According to internationally renowned development and human rights scholar Amartya Sen, “no democracy has ever suffered a great famine” (1999: 180-181). Specifically, Sen notes that throughout history famines have been avoided in democratic states because these states’ promotion of political and civil rights afford people the opportunity to draw forceful attention to their general needs and to demand appropriate public action through voting, criticizing, protesting, and the like. Authoritarian states, which curtail democracy and free press, sustain much less pressure to respond to the acute suffering of their people and can therefore continue with faulty policies. Sen’s discussion of many of the great famines within recent history – including those in Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, China, the former USSR, and North Korea – helps emphasize the fundamental relationship between democracy, civil liberties, and widespread famine and hunger (Sen 1999).
Ironically, while Ethiopia is facing a hunger crisis and making urgent appeals for aid, tonnes of food are actually leaving the country. This illogical development is due to the fact that the regime in Addis has sold large tracts of arable land to a range of foreign investors and corporations in transactions described as “land grabs.” The process also involves “villagization,” a government-led program which entails the forcible relocation of indigenous communities from locations reserved for large, foreign-owned plantations. Reports by rights groups list a plethora of human rights violations, including murders, beatings, rapes, imprisonment, intimidation, and political coercion by the government and authorities. A report by the Oakland Institute (OI), a prominent international human rights organization, vividly describes how via “strongarm tactics reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, the Ethiopian regime has moved tens of thousands of people against their will to purpose-built communes that have inadequate food and lack health and education facilities to make way for large, foreign-owned commercial agricultural projects.”
Notably, the program has also led to food insecurity, a destruction of livelihoods and the loss of cultural heritage of ethnic groups.
Essentially, the Ethiopian regime’s participation in “land grabs” represents a dire lack of leadership, prioritization, and proper governance. It has caused terrible disruption to local communities and greatly harmed food security in the name of economic development. Such failure is reminiscent of previous humanitarian crises in the country. As described by Mosse (1993), during the 1960s and 1970s, the nomadic Afars of Ethiopia were displaced from their pasturelands in the Awash valley. The Awash River was controlled in the 1960s to provide irrigation for Dutch, Israeli, Italian, and British firms to grow sugar and cotton. Consequently, the annual flooding of the river, which covered the valley with rich soil and provided grazing lands for the Afars, was disrupted. The Afars went in search of new pastures and attempted to make a living on the ecologically fragile uplands, which were poorly suited to their nomadic lifestyle. Cattle found less to eat and the Afars began to starve. Subsequently, when drought struck Ethiopia’s Wollo region in 1972, between 25 and 30 percent of the Afars perished. The problem was not due to particular inadequacies of the Afars – who had flourished for centuries; rather, the problem was with the attempt to develop the Afar lands and bring them into the mainstream economy, without any regard for their actual needs. Ultimately, the pursuit of economic growth or development, if not sensitive or responsive to local needs, can so damage existing local populations and communities that substantial harm, poverty, deprivation, and hunger are created as a result (Mosse 1993).
Ethiopia’s hunger crisis is an important humanitarian issue meriting immediate attention and concern. In order to fully understand the crisis it is imperative to recognize that while the environment has been an important contributing factor, a range of other structural socio-political and governance dynamics, including corruption, the lack of rule of law or democracy, poor governance, failures in long-term planning, and misplaced national and development priorities have also been highly influential.
Mohammed Jibril and his family in Mieso district West Hararghe Zone in Oromia region. Photograph: William Davison
On a bright afternoon in east Ethiopia, Mohammed Jibril’s family is passing around corncobs roasted over a fire. Bulky cows lounge on the other side of a shady tree, munching from a golden carpet of cereal.
It is a picturesque rural scene, complete with a forested mountain towering over the plains. Yet Jibril is worried and, when asked about this year’s crops from his three hectares of land, he is scathing. “What would I harvest?” he asks, gesticulating at his scrappy cornfield.
Due to a lack of rain, Jibril, 28, expects to collect only about 400kg of corn. Times were better a decade ago in the Mieso district of West Hararghe Zone, in Ethiopia’s Oromia region; back then, Jibril harvested up to 20 times that amount. Now most of his failed crop is only useful as fodder for his herd.
The story is the same across almost all of eastern Ethiopia, after a succession of supposed rainy seasons largely failed to materialise. The crisis has left 8.2 million of the country’s 96 million people in need of food aid – a number that could almost double in 2016as the effects of El Niño linger.
Jibril spent $100 (£65) renting a tractor this year; by his side is a Kalashnikov rifle worth more than $1,000. He is not among the poorest in Ethiopia, but he is worried about the immediate future. “If I don’t sell the cows they will run out of food and die before the next harvest,” he said. He has sold three this year, but at a steep discount as farmers all around him also offload livestock before the situation worsens.
As with the last dry spell, in 2011, Ethiopia’s government, with foreign assistance, looks likely to prevent the catastrophes of the past. In 1973, Emperor Haile Selassie’s neglect for the countryside led to the deaths of about 300,000 – and helped topple his regime a year later. A decade later, civil war during a socialist dictatorship led to famine when rains failed. Aid workers think the current development-focused administration, experienced at crisis management after almost 25 years in power, can cope. This month officials said the government has allocated $192m for relief efforts.
But the severity of the crisis raises questions about why Ethiopia still needs emergency aid and food imports given the nation’s agriculture-led economic growth and decades of development assistance from donors.
The government is commended by partners for its pro-poor budgeting, which means directing spending towards water, health, education, agriculture and infrastructure. With agriculture employing almost 80% of the workforce, improving farm productivity is key. The primary focus has been providing advice, seeds and fertiliser to smallholders. Over the past five years the government has also encouraged large-scale farming, which has not yet added significantly to food production. And in 2011, with assistance from donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the government created the Agricultural Transformation Agency to boost yields and improve value chains.
Those efforts have led to agricultural growth that has averaged 6.6% a year since 2010, according to the finance ministry. What has not happened is the eradication of severe poverty and vulnerability. The UN Development Programmeconcluded this year that although Ethiopia’s poverty rate dropped from 39% in 2005 to 26% in 2013, the number of people in extreme poverty remained at roughly 25 million due to population growth.
Even if food surpluses were available from fertile areas in the highlands to the west, it is not clear they would reach those in the east. The government created a commodity exchange in 2008, again with donor support, that was supposed to modernise food markets. But seven years later, the bourse is still primarily a trading post for the country’s main exports, such as coffee and sesame. It has yet to change the way staple foods are distributed around the country.
According to the government’s bullish predictions, food surpluses should be available next year, and the economy will keep growing rapidly. During previous El Niño years, the economy shrunk by up to 5%. But the finance ministry says growth of approximately 10% – driven also by infrastructure spending and a construction boom – will not be affected this time because agriculture is now less dependent on rain, and the economy is less dependent on agriculture. The ministry’s data says 39% of gross domestic product now stems from farming, compared with 45% in 2010.
In areas like Mieso, the change is not evident. The ground under even the more arid stretches is believed to hold enough water to irrigate swaths of land, according to local experts, but the investment has not been made to harness it. After the east African food crisis in 2011, the talk was of building up the resilience of communities to drought, but achieving this will be tough, said an NGO head, who did not want to be named. “It’s really, really expensive to make boreholes, it’s really really, expensive to make irrigation. If we had unlimited funds it wouldn’t be a problem, but we don’t.”
Others blame tiny smallholdings and insecure land tenures as one of the key reasons that millions of Ethiopian farmers do not move beyond rain-dependent subsistence. The state owns all land in Ethiopia.
Whatever the underlying reasons, with the crisis running counter to the narrative of an ascendant African powerhouse leaving poverty behind, some aid agency members were concerned at official attempts to downplay the crisis.
“There is this huge competition for scarce emergency resources around the world, so you really have to push. But without a big push from the government – they’ve been saying two things at the same time, ‘Help us’, and ‘Everything’s fine’ – that mixed messaging sure does not help in getting the resources,” said another charity executive, speaking anonymously. Most foreigners working in Ethiopia for NGOs, embassies, or international organisations do not criticise Ethiopia’s government publicly due to concerns their work will be affected.
Ethiopian officials now seem to have changed their tone, with the prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, visiting affected areas and his government making a clear appeal for assistance in unison with the international community. A total of $340m is needed just for the rest of this year.
“The challenge we have before us is incredibly serious, and it will take the collective effort of the entire international community to support the government in preventing the worst effects of El Niño now and well into next year,” said John Aylieff, from the World Food Programme, earlier this month.
Just couple months ago, Western leaders and media outlets were fascinated with Ethiopia’s ‘miraculous’ economic growth. From Bill Gates to Obama and everyone else in between, they were convinced and tried to persuade others that Ethiopia has put that sad history of hunger behind itself and emerged as the fastest growing economy in Africa, if not the world.
Fast forward to these past few weeks, reports have begun giving back Ethiopia its old name- a starving country begging for urgent food aid. A month ago, the number of people needing aid were reported to be 4.5 million; now its 8.2 million and expected to reach 15 million by the end of this year. Two months ago when OMN first reported about the death of children from hunger in Western Hararghe, the regime dismissed the reports and suppressed the plea for emergency food aid. It has now been forced to admit the crisis and it is, as usual, asking the world for food aid to feed its hungry population. No amount of PR campaign or cooking the numbers to showcase double digit economic growth can hide the fact that Ethiopia is once again hit with famine.
Let’s ask the obvious question: why is Ethiopia hungry again? Within the Ethiopian discourse, four factors are often attributed as causing the recurring hunger. First, the government; not just the current but also past regimes, usually blame hunger on change in weather and climatic conditions for causing crop failure that results in food shortage. But how does an economy growing by double digits, whose agricultural sector apparently shows at least 9% annual growth for over a decade and produced ‘millions of millionaire farmers’, fail to produce enough surplus to feed few provinces hit with shortage of rainfall ?
The second theory attributes the problem hunger not on shortage of food but its weak circulation within the country. Popularized by Dr Eleni Gerbremedihin, this argument states that ‘market failure’ results in a situation where one province starves while another wastes food due to surplus production. So, Dr Eleni took her “idea whose time has come” to the World Bank and Meles Zenawi resulting with establishment of Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in 2008. Launched with huge financial injection and massive public relation campaign, the project promised to make hunger history by ushering in a new system of market efficiency. As inspiring as Dr Eleni was, few of us remained skeptical from the get go. In response to her article promoting her project, I wrote a piece which argued that as long as the political market remains monopolized by one group, her ambition of creating an efficient and competitive exchange system is unlikely to be realized. I hate to say I told you so but 7 years later, ECX’s much anticipated revolution in agricultural market is not visible. Eleni herself has moved on ( quit or fired depending on who you ask). And hunger is back to being Ethiopia’s trademark. Genuine efforts to engineer market efficiency are either be rejected or sabotaged to serve the regime. If we take Dr Eleni’s project, the regime twisted and turned into a tool for further monopolizing the market. ECX enabled EFFORT owned companies to push out competitors and monopolize coffee export. A mechanism ( ECX ) that meant to open up the market to increase efficiency has turned out be a tool for control, corruption and monopolistic market practice.
The third argument blames hunger on the land tenure policy of the country. The argument goes that the source of food shortage in Ethiopia is farmers cultivating crop on small and fragmented plots of land using century old subsistent farming practices. Highly publicized during the 2005 election as key policy element of the CUD, this proposed solution advocates privatizing land ownership so that wealthy investors can help develop large plots of land using technologically advanced tools and inputs. This argument has already been put to test and failed to yield its intended result. Although land has not been officially privatized, domestic and foreign investors have been granted as much land as they request at dirt cheap price. Yet we are not witnessing the anticipated improvement in agricultural productivity and hunger remains a recurrent problem. Millions are starving even after over 3 million hectare of land has been leased out to the rich. Privatizing land while the political system is not competitive means, land would be transferred from millions of smallholders to few with connection to the ruling class. These few ‘investors’ are driven with profit maximizing incentives hence mostly produce for export, or hoard their product to limit circulation with the market to keep price high.
This leaves us with the fourth argument which asserts that lack of freedom is the real cause of hunger. This idea was developed by India’s Amartya Sen, who used Ethiopia as main example on a thesis that would net him Nobel Prize. Basically the argument affirms that hunger occurs only in dictatorship not in democracy. In democracy drought doesn’t necessarily lead to starvation as the media, civic society and elected officials preemptively publicize and exert pressure on the government to act early to ensure food supply. Let’s take Ethiopia and Kenya for instance. Their shared border provinces are inhabited by same people who mostly live nomadic life, and the climate condition is the same. Whenever drought hits Southern Ethiopia, it also hits Northern Kenya. But hunger in Ethiopia side of the border is a frequent phenomenon; Kenya rarely witnesses it. Hence, lack of democracy is the only argument of the four which has not been tested and still stands as plausible in Ethiopia. As long as the country is governed by authoritarian regimes, drought projection are unlikely to be acted up on, leaving farmers natural calamity whenever climate changes.
This current famine did not only bust the myth of Ethiopia’s economic miracle. It has also debunked the argument that the country could imitate the East Asian model of rapid economic growth while suppressing freedom. They can cook numbers, they could fool western diplomats and media outlets but, hunger has come back once again to unravel deception of the regime and illusion of its supporters. Poverty, and its worst form hunger, will remain the hallmark of Ethiopia until the people attain freedom and establish a government that depends on their consent rather its own gun and external aid.
The views expressed in this post (blog) are those of the author/authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OromianEconomist. Posting does not imply endorsement of views by the author/ authors.
“…UN now warning that without action some “15 million people will require food assistance” next year, more than inside war-torn Syria. ….Hardest-hit areas are Ethiopia’s eastern Afar and southern Somali regions, while water supplies are also unusually low in central and eastern Oromo region.” Unicef
Millions hungry as Ethiopia drought bites
(Unicef, News24, October 22, 2015): The number of hungry Ethiopians needing food aid has risen sharply due to poor rains and the El Nino weather phenomenon with around 7.5 million people now in need, aid officials said on Friday.
That number has nearly doubled since August, when the United Nations said 4.5 million were in need – with the UN now warning that without action some “15 million people will require food assistance” next year, more than inside war-torn Syria.
“Without a robust response supported by the international community, there is a high probability of a significant food insecurity and nutrition disaster,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, said in a report.
The UN children’s agency, Unicef, warns over 300 000 children are severely malnourished.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which makes detailed technical assessments of hunger, predicted a harvest “well below average” in its latest report.
“Unusual livestock deaths continue to be reported,” FEWS NET said. “With smaller herds, few sellable livestock, and almost no income other than charcoal and firewood sales, households are unable to afford adequate quantities of food.”
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, borders the Horn of Africa nation of Somalia, where some 855 000 people face need “life-saving assistance”, according to the UN, warning that 2.3 million more people there are “highly vulnerable”.
El Nino comes with a warming in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, and can cause unusually heavy rains in some parts of the world and drought elsewhere.
Hardest-hit areas are Ethiopia’s eastern Afar and southern Somali regions, while water supplies are also unusually low in central and eastern Oromo region.
Sensitive issue
Food insecurity is a sensitive issue in Ethiopia, hit by famine in 1984-85 after extreme drought.
Today, Ethiopia’s government would rather its reputation was its near-double-digit economic growth and huge infrastructure investment – making the country one of Africa’s top-performing economies and a magnet for foreign investment.
Still, nearly 20 million Ethiopians live below the $1.25 poverty line set by the World Bank, with the poorest some of the most vulnerable to weather challenges.
Ethiopia’s government has mobilised $33m in emergency aid, but the UN says it needs $237m.
Minster for Information Redwan Hussein told reporters at a recent press conference that Ethiopia is doing what it can.
“The support from donor agencies has not yet arrived in time to let us cope with the increasing number of the needy population,” he said.
Drought, food crisis and Famine in Ethiopia 2015: Children and adults are dying of lack of food, water and malnutrition. Animals are perishing of persisting drought. The worst Affected areas are: Eastern and Southern Oromia, Afar, Ogaden and Southern nations.
The tale of two countries (Obama’s/TPLF’s Ethiopia and Real Ethiopia): The Oromo (Children, Women and elders) are dying of genocidal mass killings and politically caused famine, but Obama has been told only rosy stories and shown rosy pictures.
By Tokkicha Abbaa Milkii, http://www.ayyaantuu.net/
“We are still surprised by the prevalence of draught-induced food shortages in Africa, 3,500 years after the Pharaohs worked out how to store grain.” (The dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Buend De Mesquita and Alastair Smith, p x-xi)
A recorded history shows that there was famine during the reign of Minilik. This famine was attributed to a plague called “ye Hidar Beshita” as their chroniclers put it. The story goes like this, “this plague killed people and their domestic animals like cows and oxen that caused a wide spread catastrophe and famine throughout the newly incorporated regions of the empire. The true story which the chroniclers did not want to mention was the plague broke out due to genocide committed in Oromia and the southern regions by Minilik army.
Somehow the plague killed millions of people and farm animals. Since the farm animals were extinct there were no means left to plow the land to grow crops. The chroniclers of the king’s history told us that the king ordered the skilled people to produce pickaxes to be distributed to the people to dig the land by hand in which the king himself participated in digging to prepare the land for growing crops. That was a “big technological innovation” discovered by Minilk to mitigate famine according to them.
This was narrated by his admirers to present Minilik as the innovative king who had concern for his people. For a shallow minded people it looks true. But Minilik who was an expert in amassing war technology like gun and ammunition from European countries to kill several millions of Oromos and the Southern Peoples had no sympathy to ask for medicine, food and farm technology aid from his war patrons.
If anybody think that this bloodthirsty monster had no knowledge how to get that aid is a fool. He had enough access and knowledge but did not want to save the subjects lives and introduce any sort of civilization into the newly incorporated regions.
To simply understand Minilik’s diplomatic ability and access to European countries it is enough to look at the next example. He amassed the next bulk of guns and ammunitions between 1968 and 1990 from four European countries with which he massacred millions of unarmed Oromos and the Southern Peoples.
Country guns ammunitions
1-England 15,000 5,000,000
2-France 500,000 20,000,000
3-Italy 50,000 10,000,000
4-Rusia 150,000 15,000,000 (Source Amharic book Written by Tabor Wamii titled “ye wugena Drsetochina yetarik Ewunetoch” p 499, translated from Amharic)
During Minilik’s reign a productive forces- all men capable of producing- from the north ( Habasha country) were forced to wage colonization war on the South (oromi’a, Sidama, wolayita,Somali, etc,) productive forces who resisted colonization. This process of war took more than two decades and during which all sort of production and progress was impeded. Therefore it is not a matter of wonder if famine and plague hit the people, because it was a man made famine and plague.
Take the case of Tewodros, he didn’t force the European missionary to produce improved farming tools. Instead he forced them to produce not even simple guns, but cannons. This shows that his appetite for mass destruction was overwhelming and clarified that Habasha rulers were and still are obsessed not with development and growth but with killing neighboring people to colonize and loot their wealth. This famine is inherent in this part of the world because the regimes were busy at war and looting the resource of the people rather than development and progress.
Out of thousands of Tewodros’s barbaric acts, to mention one of his anti-production deeds “Tewodros went to Karoda village. Karoda is known with its grain production and specially, in grape production. It was said that in Gonder one barrel of wine was sold with one bar of salt. Europeans said Karod wine was superior to European wine. He (Tewodros) ordered that grapes to be uprooted. Everybody who heard the King’s order uprooted his grapes. After that there was no wine in Ethiopia. Haleka Weldemariam wrote that, “Tewodros upon his arrival at Karoda ordered the people to be gathered at one place, 1700 people including children were gathered together. He packed all people in the houses at a maximum capacity and burnt them alive.” (Yewugena dirsetochina ye tarik Ewunetoch, by Tabor Wami, p416-417). Tewodros’s advocates try to convince us that he had a big vision for Ethiopia. I don’t understand how, the king who instead of rewarding those productive people at Karoda, burn them alive can be presented as visionary.
Tewodros never owned and resides in a palace and never settled in one place. He was called a king who lived in tent. He came to power through war, he waged war on different rival chiefs, brutally punished the people in the localities he found resistance. He committed genocide and brutal acts like mutilation of hands and legs, burning alive in mass, slain etc. wherever he set foot on. What makes Tewodros special is, even though he did the same crime on neighboring Wallo Oromos, his victims include Abisinyans. This does not mean that he had no hatred for other nations like Oromos, he had extreme rancor for Oromos and had a long intention to invade and evict them from their land. This evil intention was expressed in his letter written to Queen Victoria of England to ask for armaments to wipe out these Oromos whom he mentioned “pagans who occupied his father’s land”.
When we come to the modern era we find the Haile Selassie aristocratic and keliptocratic monarchy rule which the remnants of Naftenyas consider as nirvana. In actual fact it was as hell as the present time for the people who were expropriated their land and reduced to gabar, chisagna, slave, etc. This regime divided all the colonized peoples’ land among his invading army leaders who were changed to feudal land lords. This system of land ownership discouraged the farmers to produce in full capacity and famine was the day to day life style of the people. We can mention what famine meant to these rulers.
“Heart-wrenching images of starving children are a surefire way to stimulate aid donations. Since the technology to store grain has been known since the time of the pharaohs, we cannot help but wonder why the children of North Africa remain vulnerable to famine. A possible explanation lies in the observations of Ryszard Kapuscinski. Writing about the court of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Kapuscinski describes its response to efforts by aid agencies to assist millions of Ethiopians affected by drought and famine in 1972.
Suddenly report came in that those overseas benefactors who had taken upon themselves the trouble of feeding our ever-insatiable people had rebelled and were suspending shipments because our Finance Minister, Mr.Yelma Deresa, wanting to enrich the Imperial treasury, had ordered the benefactors to pay high customs fees on the aid. “You want to help?” the Minister asked. “Please do, but you must pay.” And they said “What do you mean, pay? We give help! And we are supposed to pay?” “Yes, says the minister, “those are the regulations. Do you want to help in such a way that our Empire gains nothing by it?”
The antics of Ethiopian government should perhaps come as little surprise. Autocrats need money to pay their coalition. Haile Selassie, although temporarily displaced by Italy’s invasion in the 1930s, held the throne from 1930 until overcome by decrepitude in 1974. As a long term successful autocrat, Selassie knew not to put the needs of the people above the wants of his essential supporters. To continue with Kapuscinski’s description:
‘First of all, death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday, natural thing, and it never occurred to anyone to make any noise about it. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of things. Since this was eternal and normal, none of the dignitaries would dare to bother His Most Exalted Highness with the news that in such and such a province a given person had died of hunger……..So how were we to know that there was unusual hunger up north?’
Silassie fed his supporters first and himself second; the starving masses had to wait their turn, which might never come. His callous disregard for the suffering of the people is chilling, at least until you compare it to his successor. Mengistu Hail Mariam led the Derg military regime that followed Silassie’s reign. He carried out policies that exacerbated drought in the Northern Provinces of Tigry and Wollo in the mid1980s. With civil war raging in these provinces and a two year drought, he engaged in forced collectivization. Millions were forced into collective farms and hundreds of thousands forced out of the province entirely. Mass starvation resulted. Estimates of the death toll are between 300,000 and 1 million people. From the Derg’s perspective the famine seriously weakened the rebels, a good thing as Mengistu saw it. Many of us remember Live Aid, a series of records and concerts organized by Bob Geldof to raise disaster relief. Unfortunately, as well intentioned as these efforts were, much of the aid fell under the influence of the government. For instance, trucks meant for delivering aid were requisitioned to forcibly move people into collective farms all around the country. Perhaps 100,000 people died in these relocation.” (The Dictators Hand Book, by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith, P162-163)
What I mentioned above is to refresh your memory a little bit. Even though corruption and kleptocracy were not started by Habasha rulers they were the first to introduce it to Africa. H/ Silassie started hording billions of Dollars in Swiss banks long before any African country got its independence. Therefore he is considered to be the first kleptocrat, the father and teacher of corruption in Africa.
We are still in the same vicious circle of corruption and kleptocratic rule. Instead of avoiding the barbaric acts of their fathers and forefathers todays Fascist rulers modernized and continued the same barbaric acts. Instead of burning alive, mutilation of hands and legs in public like Tewdros and Minilik, and instead of killing and throwing the dead body of their victims on the streets of cities like the military junta, today’s rulers do it behind doors, in known and un known detention camps, and prison centers like H/ Silassie deed. A hidden war is waged on the people in all colonized regions too.
Therefore it is not a matter of wander if peoples of this part of the world are starved in millions year after year. All Monarchs, Communist Military Junta leaders and The Fascist TPLF Dictators are on the same set of war against the colonized people, corruption and looting. In all of the mentioned criminal regimes government revenue was and is spent on bribing supporters and left open for corruption and on buying the loyalty of a few key cronies at the expense of general welfare. Yet these corrupt dictators make sure that the people cannot coordinate, rebel, and take control of the state and endeavor to keep those outside of their coalition poor, ignorant, and unorganized.
That is what TPLF fascists are doing today. Instead of mitigating poverty and hunger they loot all tax payers money, borrowed and aid money to reward their supportrs and buy weapons with the extra money to wage war on the colonized peoples like Oromo, sidama ,Ogadeenia, afar etc. who ask for their freedom. What is heart breaking most is on the very day they preached the self- sufficiency of the country in food supply and the idea was praised by US President, the International Agencies and medias started disclosing at least 4.5 million people are starved in a “Praised Ethiopia for its double digit economic growth”.
These Fascists behave like shy to tell the truth to the people of the country they rule about the famine looming on the people. On another hand they are courageous enough to exaggerate the damage to the donor countries to attract more relief funds. Once the aid fund is secured, it is simple for them to divert it into their private accounts, rather than being steered towards famine mitigation. Letting people die is good governance for them. This is the behavior of corrupt rulers.
I want to quote “We started this chapter with an account of Hail Silassie’s shakedown of donors. By now it should be clear that this practice is all too common, and reflects the logic of privately given aid. When private donors provide aid, governments must either strike deals with them so that the government gets its cut-that, after all, is the value of aid to a small coalition regime-or, in the absence of such deals, they must shakedown well-intentioned private donors. Either way, the government must get its piece of the action or it will make it impossible for donors to deliver assistance.”(The Dictator’s Handbook, p.186) This prevalence of master thieves among world leaders is shocking.
As the writer of this book clearly stated this practice is all too common to day and the corrupt TPLF leaders are an expert in channeling aid money to their foreign bank accounts. Their so called Civil Society’s Law was declared only to shakedown donors like their grandfather did half a century ago. So this process is a vicious circle which does not go away by itself. Nothing can stop this peril except liberating ourselves from the grip of these keliptocratic fascist dictators with our own struggle and sacrifice and build democratic and accountable governance.
One of the most common misconceptions about the challenges in food security (the term used to describe getting people consistent access to the food they need), is that it exists due to a lack of food. That’s just not true. In fact, the world already produces more than one and a half times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. So what gives?
First, it’s important to understand that being food insecure isn’t just about lacking enough food to put on the table. It’s also about lacking access to diverse nutrient-dense foods like fresh produce. In this way, some people who are obese can actually be considered food insecure if the food they consume isn’t nutritious.
Here’s a rundown of the factors leading to food insecurity.
1) The most obvious is that people can’t afford nutritious food. While it’s up to governments to ensure that healthy, affordable food is available at all times, addressing the root causes of inequality will also go a long way towards empowering people to earn higher incomes.
2) Another barrier that stands in the way of food security is a lack of access. Around the world, people can find themselves in one of two dangerous situations: they live in areas so remote that there are limited options nearby, or they live in food deserts (urban neighborhoods or towns that lack ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food.) When the latter is true, families end up buying their food from convenience stores (think 7-11) and fast food chains- both which are filled with unhealthy, processed food.
3) Distribution can be just as much of a challenge when you consider all of the things that can go wrong between food leaving its point of production to its point of sale. In the developing world, many of the roads are poorly maintained and there are few high-quality railways to transport goods to a centralized market. Imagine a one-lane dirt road in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. If a truck is delayed and it lacks adequate temperature control, much of the food could go bad before arriving at its destination. That’s a problem for the farmer, and the consumer.
4) As the planet has grown warmer and prone to more extreme weather events, small-scale farmers are paying the price. Droughts and heavy rainfall affect crop yields, and poor farmers can’t bounce back the same way that large agribusiness can. This affects consumers as well, who end up paying more when food becomes scarce. To protect farmers and consumers, world leaders and governments need to work with local farmers to fix the existing systems that leave small-scale farmers vulnerable.
5) Conflict and political instability have the power to wreak havoc on already fragile systems by interrupting distribution and isolating people. Food aid can help, but it must be done the right way- with consideration of what the local people eat, and with the intention of minimizing dependence on foreign aid.
6) Lastly, too many small-scale farmers aren’t empowered to reach their full potential– especially women. In many countries, laws exist that prevent women from inheriting the land they’ve spent their entire lives working on when their fathers or husbands pass. Similarly, women are often prevented from purchasing land, and prevented from selling their food at the market. By empowering women, more families will have the opportunity to thrive, especially since women invest more of their income in their families than men.
Furthermore, men and women alike need access to education to learn the most effective ways to grow and sell food, and they need the resources to implement the strategies they’ve learned. Without these changes, small-scale farmers are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to not only lift their families out of poverty but also to provide their communities with delicious, healthy food.
While it might feel daunting to consider how many barriers stand in the way of food security, the silver lining is that it isn’t some mystery. Experts understand what needs to be done to feed the world’s people- it’s just a matter of building support and implementing proven strategies.
Ethiopia says it is managing crisis though UN says number in need has increased by more than 55 percent this year.
(Al Jazeera, 5th September 2015) – Around 4.5 million Ethiopians could be in need of food aid because of a drought in the country, the UN has said.
Hardest-hit areas are Ethiopia’s eastern Afar and southern Somali regions, while pastures and water resources are also unusually low in central and eastern Oromo region, and northern Tigray and Amhara districts.
Reacting to the UN’s claims that the number in need had increased by more than 55% this year, Alemayew Berhanu, spokesperson for Ministry of Agriculture, told Al Jazeera that Ethiopia had “enough surplus food at emergency depots and we’re distributing it”.
“When we were informed about the problem, the federal government and the regional state authorities started an outreach programme for the affected people,” he said.
In August, the Ethiopian government said that it had allocated $35m to deal with the crisis that has been blamed on El Niño, a warm ocean current that develops between Indonesia and Peru. The UN says it needs $230m by the end of the year to attend to the crisis.
“The absence of rains means that the crops don’t grow, the grass doesn’t grow and people can’t feed their animals,” David Del Conte, UNOCHA’S chief in Ethiopia, said.
One farmer in the town of Zway told Al Jazeera that he was selling personal belongings to stay alive.
“There is nothing we can do. We don’t have enough crops to provide for our families. We are having to sell our cattle to buy food but the cattle are sick because they don’t have enough to eat,” Balcha, who has a family of nine, and grows corn and wheat, said.
El Niño
The onset of El Niño means the spatial distribution of rainfall from June to September has being very low. According to the UN children’s agency (Unicef), the El Niño weather pattern in 2015 is being seen as the strongest of the last 20 years.
Experts say it could be a major problem for the country’s economy, as agriculture generates about half of the country’s income.
Climate shocks are common in Ethiopia and often lead to poor or failed harvests which result in high levels of acute food insecurity.
Approximately 44% of children under 5 years of age in Ethiopia are severely chronically malnourished, or stunted, and nearly 28% are underweight, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Unicef says that about 264 515 children will require treatment for acute severe malnutrition in 2015 while 111 076 children were treated for severe acute malnutrition between January and May 2015
Ethiopia: Proportion of undernourished in total population in 2014-16: 32.0 %.
Number of people undernourished (millions):2014-16: 31.6 (millions)
Undernourishment means that a person is not able to acquire enough food to meet the daily minimum dietary energy requirements, over a period of one year. FAO defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment.
The Cause of Ethiopia’s Recurrent Famine Is Not Drought, It Is Authoritarianism
Dawit Ayele Haylemariam, The Huffington Post, 24 August 2015 A concerned Citizen and Graduate Student of Political Science at University of Passau, Germany
Twenty years ago one Ethiopian Diaspora in Washington asked the late Prime minister Meles Zenawi what his vision for the country was. A rather polite and amiable Meles outlined his vision in a very human centered way. He said he hopes that in ten years every Ethiopian will have enough to eat three times a day and after 20 years Ethiopians will not only have enough food but they will also have the luxury of choosing what they eat.
Here we are now. Three years have passed since Meles died in office after 21 years in power. Once again Ethiopia’s food crisis is topping the headline. As seasonal rain fails in Eastern and Southern parts of the country, famine is threatening millions of Ethiopians. The UN estimates over 10 million are in need of emergency food aid.
Why is famine and hunger so common in Ethiopia?
Many experts relate Ethiopia’s cyclical famine with the country’s dependence on Rainfed smallholder agriculture, drought, rapid population growth or agricultural market dysfunctions. Although these factors do have significant role in the matter, they tend to hide the critical cause of hunger in the country – lack of rights and accountable government.
Nobel Prize winner and economist Amartya Sen has extensively analyzed the relationship between democracy and famine in his book Development as Freedom. Sen argues democracies don’t have famines, only authoritarian systems do. Famine tend to happen in places where the victims are oppressed by dictators.
A historical investigation of famine also identified 30 major famines during the 20th century. All happened in countries led by autocratic rule or that were under armed conflict, four being in Ethiopia.
Why does autocracy lead to famine? The most fundamental reason is that autocrats often don’t care enough about the population to prevent famine. Autocrats maintain power through force, not popular approval. This argument has been proven true in the case of Ethiopia.
During 1983-1985 the worst famine in the country’s history had led to more than 400,000 deaths. Extensive investigation by Alexander De Waal in his book Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia has found “more than half this mortality can be attributed to human rights abuses that caused the famine to come earlier, strike harder, and extend further than would otherwise have been the case.” The military government is not only spent between $100 and $200 million to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution while millions were starving, Mengistu’s regime also attempted to impose customs duties on aid shipments.
Similarly during the 1973-1974 Wollo famine, attempts to hide the reality of the situation by the Imperial Feudal System caused 300,000 deaths. This particular famine was not a problem of food shortage in the country but lack of ability to access food. The Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture Report of 1972 stated that output for 1972-1973 was only 7% lower than the previous year. Also,food price in Wollo were no higher-often substantially lower-than elsewhere in the country. The problem was the poor just couldn’t afford to buy. Meanwhile, Emperor Haile Selassie spend some $35 million to celebrate his eightieth birthday in 1973.
Unfortunately the trend of autocratic-led hunger has not changed under the current government either, if anything Meles’s regime took it to the next level.
In 2004 Humanitarian Exchange Magazine exposed that disregarding experts advise that the situation in the country was very severe and does qualifies as a famine, the government of Ethiopia and USAID conspired to downplay the 2002-2004 food crisis as “localized famine” in fear of global media attention and political dangers for the EPRDF. The report states “the lack of classic famine images….facilitates further disengagement by the media and Western publics, even as large numbers of vulnerable people face destitution, malnutrition, morbidity and mortality.”
Again 2010 in a report titled Development without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites Repression in Ethiopia, Human Right Watch extensively documented how the EPRDF is using development aid to suppress political dissent by conditioning access to essential safety net programs on support for the ruling party.
Today, once again the danger of another catastrophic famine is looming large on the horizon. Ongoing drought worsened by the El Niño global weather phenomenon has already caused deaths of many cattle and have put as many as 14 million people at risk.
The government also argues the country has already realized food security at a national level, that is to say we have enough food in the country to feed everyone. The inherent flaw in this argument is that the presence of food in the country doesn’t necessarily mean those affected by drought will have access to it. As it was the case during the 1973 Wollo famine, when a crop fails it not only affects the food supply, it also destroys the employment and livelihood of farmers, denying them the ability to buy food from the market.
Reports have also shown that the government was informed of the risk of seasonal rain failure forecast as early as two months ago but it chose to keep it to itself. Had the government shared the information with the media and local governments to inform pastoralists to move their cattle near rivers or highlands, much of the animal loss would have been avoided and relief supports would have been delivered on time.
Democracy can effectively prevent famine
Why is the Ethiopia government acting so irresponsibly? The answer is simple – because there is no incentive for the government to work hard to avert famine. Amartya Sen argument related to absence of political incentives generated by election, multiparty politics and investigative journalism is also true in the case of Ethiopia.
The EPRDF led government has successfully wiped out all groups that might pose any form of threat to its power. Fresh from its 100% “election” victory, with very fragmented opposition parties, no civil society and no scope for uncensored public criticism, Hailemariam’s regime doesn’t have to suffer the political consequences of its failure to prevent famine.
If there were a democratic system to keep the government accountable, the state’s response would have been much different. For instance, Botswana, like Ethiopia, is prone to drought but a democracy since its independence in 1966, Botswana never had a famine. Botswana’s democratic government immediately deploys relief efforts during every drought, and even improves them from one drought to the next. Had the government in Botswana failed to undertake timely action, there would have been severe criticism and pressure from the opposition and maybe even bigger political cost in future elections. In contrast, the Ethiopian governments did not have to worry with those prospects.
Another Sen’s key argument is information flow and free press – democracy contributes greatly to bring out information that can have an enormous impact on policies for famine prevention. If it weren’t for the foreign media reporting and social media activists outcry, the government might have kept the current problem a secret for long and caused much greater damage than it already has. In Sen’s words “free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early warning system a country threatened by famine can have”
If aid organizations comprehensively and immediately deploy humanitarian assistance, the current crisis could be impelled with minimal damage. However, the argument that famine in Ethiopia is caused by drought doesn’t hold water anymore. Unless the problem is addressed from its roots, another famine is just a matter of time. For Ethiopia to truly achieve food security and avoid any dangers of famine in the future, nothing but building a democratic, transparent and accountable system is the solution.
Due to lack of rain, food crisis and famine people are dying in Ethiopia. Mainstream medias are not reporting. In the absence of free press, the TPLF/ Ethiopian government is hiding the tragedy going on. Children, women and men are dying in rural areas of Eastern and Southern Oromia, Afar state, Ogaden and southern nations. Animals are being perished due to persistent drought. The TPLF/Ethiopian government has also engaged in intensive land grabs and evictions in unaffected (food surplus) areas and intensified the destructions of food security system. In central Oromia (Burrayyuu, Sululta, Bishoftu, etc) and Western Oromia (Ilu Abbaa boraa and Wallaggaa) families in thousands become homeless and destitute because of land grabs both in urban and rural areas. Citizens are reporting the crisis and crying for help and no help is received yet both from the government and international humanitarian aid. Social media and Oromia Media network are reporting in Afaan Oromoo.
Aug. 5: Hunger is once again threatening vast swathes of Africa because of drought and high food prices. The United Nations has estimated that 14 million are at risk and at the heart of the looming catastrophe is Ethiopia, where over 10 million are in need of emergency food aid. ITN’s Martin Geissler reports.
Dhumaatii beelaan uummattoota naannoo roobni hin geenye irra gahaa jiru daa’immaan, haadholii fi horiiwwan yeroo itti wal faana dhumaatii sukkanneessaa irra jiranitti mootummaan Wayyaanee ofii cooma muree guddina biyyaa odeessaa jira.Kan baayee nama gaddisiisu keesssaa naannowwan kun beelli itti hammaatetti nyaataan mootummaan keenya isaan deggeraa jira jechunis miillii fi harki wayyaanee kan taate jaleen OPDO’n miidiyaa irraan oduu sobaa lafa naqaa jirti kan seenan lubbuu kumaan lakkawamaa jiru gaafatullee sobuudhaan uummata beelaan dhumaa jirutti qoosan. Yeroo biyyaaf boo’ichaa wayyaanee fi jala kaattuu sheef garaa guuttachuun nyaattee uummatatti dhaadatti. Kanumaanuu kan walq abate gaaffiii uummanni Baalee aanaalee garagaraa irratti mootummaan maaliif soba gargaarsi godhame nama dhuunfaa irraa kan hafe hin agine kan warra beela’aniif kan jedhanii wayyaanee soba ishee saaxilan yeroo kana gara siyaasatti harkifamanii qabamaa kan jiran jiru. Akkasuma sadaasa 25/2015 yuuniversirii Madda walaabutti barattotni gaaffii kaasan uummata keenya obbolaa keenya beelaan dhumaniif gaddina jedhuu fi akaksuma barattootni moora yuuniversitichaa mootummaa wayyaanee balaaleffatan.
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