Originally from: lina
                        
nation hungry for more food and education
(Filed: 29/09/2003)

As famine hits Ethiopia once again, W F Deedes reports
from Leku on the causes of Africa's latest crisis

A journey 190 miles south from Addis Ababa to Leku
takes you into the heart of the famine that is again
plaguing Ethiopia. We stop at a compound there and
move into a big tent where a score of mothers have
brought their small children for therapeutic feeding.

All these children, the doctor explained to me, are
wasting away; that is to say they have fallen more
than 70 per cent below the normal weight for height
ratio. You can tell when a child is not responding to
such treatment, because the gleam in the eye fails.
The mother's eyes which followed us round were dulled
by that sense of helplessness you find in famines and
refugee camps.

Yet these are women who, given half a chance, would be
caring for their children, carrying the burdens of all
African women and representing the backbone of the
community. This is a country, bear in mind, where by
custom the women eat last and least.

Then on to another compound where a huge throng of
hungry men, women and children have gathered to draw
their monthly allowance of 33 lbs of maize. This is
supplementary feeding for pregnant women and children
being organised by the children's development agency
Plan. These people are not sick but hungry. Men run
back and forth humping sacks of grain from the USA.

There is irony in this hunger we see all around us,
for this area is green and lush. Nothing of the desert
here. Cattle graze off rich pasture. The eucalyptus
trees, the cacti and the ensett which resembles banana
trees grow high.

So why this destitution? Mainly because the price of
coffee, main crop in this region, has fallen from 40
birr (£4) to 10 birr (£1) a kilo. "The future for my
children is grim," says Medina Berassa who grows
coffee on a plot one quarter the size of a football
field. "There are so many and the land is so little.
It is in God's hands."

But I witnessed this destitution and therapeutic
feeding of children going on in Addis Ababa as well.

This is Ethiopia of 1986 all over again, without Bob
Geldof and Band Aid but with an important difference.
The aid agencies and big non-government organisations,
familiar with Ethiopia's proneness to famine, have
been on the alert. That is saving a lot of lives.

But as we drive away from these melancholy scenes in
Leku, I reflect on what I have learned as the reasons
for this perpetual failure of Ethiopia to feed its own
people. Even in a good year six million Ethiopians now
depend on grain from the outside world for their daily
bread. This year the figure is 13.2 million or a fifth
of the population.

Simon Mechale, Commissioner of the Disaster Prevention
and Preparedness Commission knows why. Only a 10th of
this country, five times the size of the UK, is arable
and much of that is hopelessly unproductive. Good soil
has been degraded. A million tons of topsoil is eroded
every year. Deforestation at the rate of at least 250
square miles a year – wood hewn for cooking and
selling – has reduced rainfall, increased drought and
devastated much of the environment.

There is a grievous lack of farming skills in a
population almost 90 per cent of which lives off the
land. Water resources have been neglected. To all of
which it is relevant to add this is a country which
recently spent almost half its gross income on
military readiness.

True, there is an uneasy truce in the wasteful war
between Eritrea and Ethiopia; so uneasy that UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan has just called upon them
expressively to end their "cold peace". Against such a
background it is hardly surprising to find half this
nation's children ill nourished and one in 10 so badly
fed that its body is wasting away.

So what's to be done? Aware that this state of affairs
is becoming insupportable, aid donors and the World
Bank have been meeting in Geneva to talk.

Marie Staunton, Director of Plan UK with whom I have
been travelling, is right in saying that the drought
requiring huge dollops of food aid which steadily
increase dependency has become a vicious circle. Aid
has grossly outstripped development. This year for
instance America has given £350 million worth of food
but only £3.5 million for development.

A population of 67 million is soaring at 2.8 per cent
a year. This is a country crying out for education of
women, churches permitting, in family planning.

The most urgent need is policies leading to better use
of resources. In Lalibela a Plan enterprise
illustrates what can be done. We visited a model farm,
where a typical smallholder, with only half a hectare
or half a football pitch at his disposal, has been
encouraged to grow onions, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes,
cabbage and lettuce. As well as feeding his family he
makes £150 a year.

In 2001 this man was on food aid which he has now
dispensed with. Better still, some of the 16,500
farmers in the area being advised by Plan visit this
demonstration holding and profit from it. Tourism is
yielding only a fraction of its potential. No country
in Africa has stronger appeal to the tourist than
Ethiopia. It is absurd that a country so rich in
history, treasure and natural beauty should be
attracting more aid workers than tourists.

"We are not making good use of our land," Girma
Woldegiorgis, the president of Ethiopia, emphasised to
me. "We need better productivity." Then he reminded me
that when I first visited Ethiopia in 1935 the
population would have been around 15 million, one
quarter of today's. No, he went on to assure me, the
churches raise no objection to family planning. So
there lie perhaps two keys to release Ethiopia from
its plight – family planning and far better use of
land. In brief, more development, less relief.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/29/weth29.xml