Famine in Ethiopia. Who/what is to blame?
I suppose everyone has already heard about the extremely dire situation in the Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia. The drought and famine there. But here I will talk about Ethiopia. Some may remember the drought in Ethiopia from the 80's. Well now Ethiopia is again threatened by disaster. And everyone is looking for somebody, or something to blame. Some are attributing this situation to climate change which has caused severe drought, others are focusing more on the terrible political conditions in the region. I think that as it usually happens, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It is a combination of both.
Of course, for those who are finding difficulties to visualise where the Horn of Africa is, here:
The UN aid coordinator Valerie Amos came to Addis Ababa with a message to the international community requesting to provide additional supplies of foods to the countries in the region. She just returned from Somalia and reported about thousands of women leaving the region carrying their starving children in their arms. Most children were severely underfed. They had walked for days without putting anything in their mouth. The nomads are losing their livestock and with it, their only means of livelihood.
What is worse, the food problem was supposed to be solved by now. Last year the Ethiopian prime minister Zenawi officially announced that one of the main priorities in his government's 5-year plan was not just to provide enough food for domestic needs, but also to start exporting to the neighbouring countries. Moreover, the food production was supposed to double by 2015. But reality looks very different now. As early as February the government had to ask UN for urgent aid for more than 3 million threatened people. And they are probably much more than what the official data says.
But what is causing this disastrous situation? Climate or politics? For years, Ethiopia has been announcing two-digit growth which the IMF then usually fixes and downgrades. But still a growth. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Ethiopians depends on food aid. The main reason is said to be the drought that happened after the much awaited rain season which never came last year. Drought has become a chronic disease of the entire region in recent decades. To make it worse, access to the most severely affected regions in Somalia is very complicated because many of the communities there are in the middle of the endless civil war.
But nature is only half of the story. The other half is the weak or non-existent policy of the governments in the region and the lack of resources to deal with a crisis which by far exceeds the capabilities of a single country. It is no surprise that the least developed regions are the most affected. And those are the most politically marginalised regions. Another factor is the giving of large portions of the arable land to foreign investors for the production of biofuels and foods for export. While the local population is starving and cannot afford to get access to any of it.
After the sharp criticism of the so called "land destruction" by agro firms from India, China and Saudi Arabia, the state investments agency of Ethiopia decided to terminate some of the lease contracts with those companies and is now trying its best to achieve more transparency. In the future these contracts will be publicly announced and will be accessible to anybody who wants to investigate them. But this is only part of what has to be done overall.
The organisational woes aside, more efforts need to be done to introduce drought-resistant crops, predominantly for domestic use. The now existent crops are not diverse enough and the risks of total crop failure like this year's are high. These efforts are in a dead end at the moment, and not so much for the lack of political will to do it, but because of the conservative food habits of the local people.
Even today 80% of the Ethiopians are mainly occupied with agriculture. If the country really wants to confront the famine problem, the government should concentrate more on the people. It must start by decentralising the food production and then stimulating the millions of small farms with comprehensive measures to provide better access to a new variety of crop seeds. Otherwise this situation will be coming back every next year, and with increased severity.
And to those who are ready to say "Why should this concern me", well you know that in a globalised world the problems in one region soon spread over to other regions, cause unrest, immigration, humanitarian crises, and ultimately, lots and lots of unforeseen consequences that sooner or later come to bite us all on the back in one form or another. And dealing with it all becomes much more difficult, if not even impossible at that point, because it's too late and very little had been done while it had been early.
Of course, for those who are finding difficulties to visualise where the Horn of Africa is, here:
The UN aid coordinator Valerie Amos came to Addis Ababa with a message to the international community requesting to provide additional supplies of foods to the countries in the region. She just returned from Somalia and reported about thousands of women leaving the region carrying their starving children in their arms. Most children were severely underfed. They had walked for days without putting anything in their mouth. The nomads are losing their livestock and with it, their only means of livelihood.
What is worse, the food problem was supposed to be solved by now. Last year the Ethiopian prime minister Zenawi officially announced that one of the main priorities in his government's 5-year plan was not just to provide enough food for domestic needs, but also to start exporting to the neighbouring countries. Moreover, the food production was supposed to double by 2015. But reality looks very different now. As early as February the government had to ask UN for urgent aid for more than 3 million threatened people. And they are probably much more than what the official data says.
But what is causing this disastrous situation? Climate or politics? For years, Ethiopia has been announcing two-digit growth which the IMF then usually fixes and downgrades. But still a growth. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Ethiopians depends on food aid. The main reason is said to be the drought that happened after the much awaited rain season which never came last year. Drought has become a chronic disease of the entire region in recent decades. To make it worse, access to the most severely affected regions in Somalia is very complicated because many of the communities there are in the middle of the endless civil war.
But nature is only half of the story. The other half is the weak or non-existent policy of the governments in the region and the lack of resources to deal with a crisis which by far exceeds the capabilities of a single country. It is no surprise that the least developed regions are the most affected. And those are the most politically marginalised regions. Another factor is the giving of large portions of the arable land to foreign investors for the production of biofuels and foods for export. While the local population is starving and cannot afford to get access to any of it.
After the sharp criticism of the so called "land destruction" by agro firms from India, China and Saudi Arabia, the state investments agency of Ethiopia decided to terminate some of the lease contracts with those companies and is now trying its best to achieve more transparency. In the future these contracts will be publicly announced and will be accessible to anybody who wants to investigate them. But this is only part of what has to be done overall.
The organisational woes aside, more efforts need to be done to introduce drought-resistant crops, predominantly for domestic use. The now existent crops are not diverse enough and the risks of total crop failure like this year's are high. These efforts are in a dead end at the moment, and not so much for the lack of political will to do it, but because of the conservative food habits of the local people.
Even today 80% of the Ethiopians are mainly occupied with agriculture. If the country really wants to confront the famine problem, the government should concentrate more on the people. It must start by decentralising the food production and then stimulating the millions of small farms with comprehensive measures to provide better access to a new variety of crop seeds. Otherwise this situation will be coming back every next year, and with increased severity.
And to those who are ready to say "Why should this concern me", well you know that in a globalised world the problems in one region soon spread over to other regions, cause unrest, immigration, humanitarian crises, and ultimately, lots and lots of unforeseen consequences that sooner or later come to bite us all on the back in one form or another. And dealing with it all becomes much more difficult, if not even impossible at that point, because it's too late and very little had been done while it had been early.