A country that cannot feed itself

Twenty years after the famine that killed more than one million people Ethiopia is still haunted by the ghosts of its
dead and struggles to provide for the living. Peter Stanford meets the men and women who survived the great hunger There’s almost nothing left in Mekele to remind me that 20 years ago tens of thousands walked into this city in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, from the surrounding mountains. They were starving because famine was sweeping the countryside and they came in search of food. Their desperate, bemused, terrified faces and the swollen bellies of the children they clutched to them still haunt Western imaginations two decades after the hellish pictures sent back of starvation on a colossal scale gave birth to Band Aid.
In Mekele itself, though, it takes me several hours to find anyone who can even point to where the camps once were. There are plenty of people of a certain age in the city, now abuzz with new buildings and commerce, who have a vague idea, but in the end it is the forest of eucalyptus trees, planted in memory of the dead by Fr Angelo Regaso, an Italian Catholic priest who was there in 1984, that gives away the spot where the refugees from hunger huddled under canvas.
I feel a certain awe as I stand on the spot. There is one tree for everyone who died and they stretch as far as the eye can see around a lake on the outskirts of the city. This is where, I recall, Cardinal Basil Hume came 20 years ago to give consolation to the suffering in a mission that made international headlines.
Mekele, Korem, Bati, Hayk. The names of the camps echo down the years along with Michael Buerk’s news reports and Bob Geldof’s crusade to awaken a complacent world’s conscience. Almost eight million Ethiopians were at risk. A million of them died, though such were the urgent needs of the living that accurate records of fatalities were never kept. That anyone survived at all was down to the biggest single peacetime mobilisation of the international community in the 20th century.
At Bati, I chance upon Ahmed, the gravedigger back in 1984. He shows me the graveyard that served the camp. Today it is hidden under a sugar cane field and elementary school that now stand on the site of the camp. The individual piles of stones each mark the rest ing place of 16 bodies, buried in haste on days when hundreds were dying within hours of each other, are overrun with weeds. In another 10 years, they will have disappeared altogether.
Memorials are a luxury of the rich. Why spend time recalling a tragedy that happened 20 years ago in a country that today remains one of the poorest in Africa, a place where to make sure disaster will never happen again requires every ounce of determination that can be mustered? The Ethiopians are undoubtedly an energetic and resourceful people. You only have to get up each morning at six to see them flocking on foot to the fields, the women and children in green and purple, cajoling along oxen, goats and donkeys laden with wood to sell in the market, the men with their faces encased in white wraps against the cold, hoes spread across the back of their neck, their arms looped over each end.
But if the monuments are missing, then the pain of so many of their countrymen dying is never forgotten by Ethiopians. “Of course we feel our lost brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters in our hearts,” says Alem Biset Zeru, head of the government’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission (DPPC) in Mekele, an otherwise unemotional man who strikes his chest as he utters the words. “We remember them. We have them in our mind. That is why we do what we do.” Zeru’s organisation runs a nationwide early warning system which closely monitors the rains and anticipates any food crisis that may arise if crops fail. It was set up by Save the Children in the wake of the 1984 famine and later handed over to the government body. The transfer in itself is a sign of hope. One of the contributory factors to the disaster back in 1984 was the failure of the then Ethiopian government to make any response at all to reports of a looming catastrophe in the countryside after two years of poor rains.
The DPPC today has access to food stores around the country and to the lorries that can take that food to where it is needed when it is needed. No one will ever have to walk hundreds of kilometres to flee starvation again. We will never see a repeat of the camps. But that doesn’t mean the problem they revealed to the world has gone away.
In 2003 when the rains failed, 14 million people – out of a total population of almost 70 million – were successfully fed because of the DPPC’s efforts. Even in bountiful years, there are still some four million Ethiopians who need food aid. This is a country that cannot feed itself.
“I lost my mother, father, uncle and younger sister and brothers in 1984,” says Makonnen Imar, now head of administration at Save the Children’s office in Desse. “People have been working for development ever since to prevent it happening again. There have been gradual changes but I can say that they in themselves are not enough. They are not going to guarantee that there will not be such a big famine again. If no rain falls, it could happen again.” The population of Ethiopia has doubled since 1984 but there are few jobs in the towns. So the pressures on traditional agriculture, which occupies 90 per cent of Ethiopians, are becoming ever more acute. The average family of five now exists on a plot of half a hectare – that’s one half of a football pitch, most often split between two or three slivers. Degraded, often washed away by the seasonal floods, bursting out of the constraints of the primitive terracing, it is just not up to the task of supporting Ethiopia’s rural population.
With an older generation such a conclusion is accepted with a stoicism that is firmly rooted in religion in a land where the two great faiths, Christianity and Islam, coexist without rancour. “The rains used to let us down only once every four years,” a bearded, gaptoothed farmer in a market at Gimba, high up in north Wollo tells me. “Now it seems like that happens every year, but we cannot change nature. We must trust in it and survive.” For the young, though, such a time-honoured approach is not enough. Unlike their parents, they know there is another world out there. The spread of television – if only in the local bar – has given them a glimpse. Education, too, is changing their outlook. The elected government of Meles Zenawi spends above the UN recommended level on health and education. It aims to have a school and health post in every worida or area. Even in the most remote backwaters, you will see small children walking across the fields to go to school once they have finished their chores on the farm.
In the early years, they study in their native language – Ethiopia has many tongues as well as the Amharic used by central government. Once they get to 11, though, all lessons are in English. The schools system is designed to make them citizens of the 21st century global market, even if the local economy still runs on medieval principles.
And so the impetus for change is growing. There is a largely harmonious partnership between development agencies and local and regional officials to take up the challenge. On the outskirts of the crossroads town of Woldiya in north Wollo, a farmer shows me the organic pesticide that he and his neighbours have been helped to develop to stop aphids and weevils eating their crop. Its major ingredient is cow urine and it strips away the lining of my nostrils at 10 paces. But it cuts out the expense of
Facts about Ethiopia
Population: 69 million with 46 per cent under 15 Annual income: £60 per head External debt: £3 billion Infant mortality: 11.4 per 1000 live births (6 per 1000 in UK) Life expectancy: 46 Adult literacy: 42 per cent Religion: divided equally between Orthodox Christian and Moslems (Figures based on UN statistics for 2002) chemical pesticides, he explains patiently as I recoil, cuts wastage of crops and redirects attention to traditional wisdom about nature that had been lost.
A few hundred yards down the same dirt road, able-bodied recipients of food aid are giving something back to the community by building stone and wood groynes around a river course to redirect the flow and so stop the erosion of land when it is awash with water during the rainy season. And in a neighbouring farmstead is one of the beehives and fierce chickens given to locals to encourage them to diversify their production into commodities – honey and eggs – that can be sold in the market as a cash crop.
These simple but effective efforts in this tiny corner of a vast country are replicated many times over elsewhere. And beside such practical steps, there are more visionary projects that give a clue as to the Ethiopians commitment to building a better society. In Akesta, in north Wollo, a God-forsaken town on a high plain that put me in mind of the Russian steppes, there is a large sign in the flowerbed outside the local school. “All children,” it says, “have a right to learn and to work.” What this means in practice is that within the rough walls of this establishment, physically and mentally handicapped children are being integrated into mainstream education.
Ali Makonen was born blind. He was in the first integrated intake into the school in 2000. Before that, he says his sole ambition in life was to keep the chickens from falling into the fireplace. Now he has done so well in class that a university place has been offered.
As well as changing Ali’s life, his teacher says, it has changed Akesta. “There is social interaction in the class. That continues outside the class in families. The old ideas that meant people were ashamed of disabled children, hid them away, are now altering.” Yet if these encouraging steps within Ethiopia 20 years after the famine are ever to build up sufficient momentum to reach a point where the country can actually feed itself, it will need a great deal of outside support. For this is one of the poorest nations in the world. Its per capita annual income is just £60.
However, Ethiopia over the last two decades has been the lowest recipient of development funds in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Quite why the world is determined to punish this already blighted country is hard to fathom.
Cynics say that Ethiopia has nothing the West wants – no oil, gas or diamonds – so it gets no investment. What is certainly true is that there is a perception that the Ethiopian government is not to be trusted.
This negative view stems from the war in Eritrea (where most observers feel Ethiopia was the wronged party), and its government’s mildly Socialist nature.
Yet it is patently a government working hard for its people. There is little of the endemic corruption seen elsewhere in Africa. There is freedom of movement, freedom of speech and a democratic system. There is, in short, much that the West should be encouraging.
Back in 1984 Band Aid was about the British people making an emotional response to the sufferings of the Ethiopians. Those sufferings have not gone away 20 years later. But at least this time round there is a willingness within the country at all levels to tackle its long-term problems. The current failure of the developed world to encourage this is the real tragedy that today threatens Ethiopia.
Peter Stanford travelled to Ethiopia with the charity Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org.uk)