Why another drought in Ethiopia?

By Paul Jeffrey
Action by Churches Together (ACT)

Televised images of starving children once again have brought the world's attention to the Horn of Africa, where three years of drought have pushed millions of the region's poor to the edge of survival.

Haven't we seen this before? Those emaciated faces - are they a cruel rerun of past droughts, like the one in 1984-85 that killed as many as a million people in Ethiopia? Hasn't something been done over the years to help those people feed themselves? Why does the world have to help Ethiopia once again?

The answers to those questions are complex, and weave together meteorological conditions, changing economic development strategies, and a bloody war between Ethiopia and its closest neighbor.

Periodic drought seems to have been Ethiopia's lot for hundreds of years. Yet droughts are becoming more frequent and severe. A century ago the country suffered a drought every 10-15 years. Today they come with alarming regularity every five years or less. Although the drought-caused famine of 1984-85 remains well known, less serious but nonetheless significant droughts were suffered here in 1987, 1988, 1991-92, 1993-94, and 1999.

While global climate change may have something to do with increasing the frequency and intensity of drought here, other factors have contributed to making Ethiopians more vulnerable to erratic or scarce rainfall. A high population growth rate, dwindling farm size, unjust patterns of land tenure, inefficient farming techniques, deforestation, and degraded soils all contribute to chronic disaster. Ethiopia is a country where some 80 percent of the population depends for its livelihood on rain-fed agriculture, yet much of the good topsoil - more than two billion tons a year - gets blown away or washed down the Blue Nile River to Egypt.

Changes in rural lifestyles have meant that what relief specialists dub "coping mechanisms" - practices that allow people to withstand periodic droughts - no longer function as well. In recent decades, for example, many of the country's pastoralists have shifted to herding cattle instead of camels. Cattle are more profitable when it comes time to sell them, but they're much more vulnerable to drought than camels, as can be seen by the tens of thousands of cattle carcasses currently littering the arid lowlands in the south and east of the country.

Many of these issues were widely discussed during and after the 1984-85 famine, what some Ethiopians somberly refer to as their country's own Holocaust. Political leaders committed themselves to overcoming many of the structural problems that caused such widespread suffering, and indeed have made great progress in some areas. There's a sophisticated early-warning system in place, what relief specialists regard as the most advanced system in Africa for monitoring weather patterns and gathering and analyzing data about food harvests and relevant social indicators. There's a better road network, allowing more efficient transport of food supplies. A decentralized government bureaucracy responds better than the Addis Ababa-focused administrative styles inherited from the emperors. A more transparent and mature relationship with donor nations and greater freedom for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also helps.

Yet one of the key advances failed to make a difference this year. In 1992, the government and foreign donors set up the Food Security Reserve (FSR) to stockpile mass amounts of food that could be quickly borrowed from and dispatched to needy areas of the country should food shortages occur. It was the most visible sign of a new joint commitment between the Ethiopian government and the international community to not let famine reoccur in this country. The FSR overcame the three- to nine-month lag time inherent in food donations from major donors, principally the European Union and the United States. In a crisis, food could be rapidly borrowed from the FSR, distributed to needy communities, and repaid a few months later. According to Clive Robinson, senior field officer here for ACT member Christian Aid, the FSR constitutes "Ethiopia's best insurance against a food crisis."

For most of the 1990s, the FSR worked well. Last year, however, the system broke down when several promised food loans were not repaid in a timely manner. Rather than being able to confront the current food crisis with the 370,000 metric tons of grain which the FSR usually holds, the government has only 50,000 metric tons on hand. That means donors face the task of not only hurrying to deliver food aid to 8 million Ethiopians currently affected by the drought, but at the same time they must struggle to rebuild FSR stocks in order to better respond to future shortages. The Ethiopian government recently pledged 100,000 metric tons of grain for the FSR, a sign of its own commitment to a timely drought response.

Some have suggested that political factors contributed to the lateness of recent foreign contributions to the FSR. Both the EU and US, along with other multilateral organizations, have cut back or eliminated development assistance here, as well as suspended any discussion of debt relief, as punishment for Ethiopia's war with Eritrea, and some in the government here feel the delayed replenishment of FSR stocks carries the same political message. Yet officials of church relief organizations suggest otherwise. Anne Bousquet, the country representative for Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the overseas development and relief arm of the U.S. Catholic bishops conference, blames the delay on "misunderstanding and miscommunication" between donors. And others claim the government's constant upward revision during 1999 of the number of drought victims - from 2.5 million people at the beginning of the year to 7.7 million in December - meant the severity of the situation crept up on donors who were otherwise unaware of the true dimensions of the looming food crisis.

Several faith-based relief organizations sounded the alarm last year, long before the current drought caught the world's headlines in April of this year. Yet most were unsuccessful in catching the eye of government aid officials, and many newspaper and television editors drug their feet on doing yet another Ethiopia drought story.

In response to requests from its Ethiopian members, ACT issued large appeals for aid to Ethiopia in February and August of last year, and in April of this year requested more than $32 million in new assistance for Ethiopia programs.

In the meantime, in many parts of Ethiopia the rains haven't fallen or didn't fall when they normally do, and that phenomenon remains the most important factor in explaining the current crisis. Some areas of the country, especially the south and east of the country, where there is less presence of both the central government and NGOs, are now well into their third year of drought. Normal coping mechanisms have been exhausted, and as a result people are hungry.

The crisis is exacerbated by Ethiopia's border war with Eritrea, which broke out in May 1998, five years after Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia. Observers estimate that the Ethiopian government is spending more than $1 million every day on the conflict, maintaining half a million soldiers along the Eritrean border and resettling and feeding up to 350,000 civilians displaced by the conflict. One-tenth of the country's trucks have been pressed into shape to ferry personnel and war materiel to the northern front. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has refused to accept any food aid shipped through the Eritrean port of Assab, which before the conflict handled 75 percent of relief assistance destined for the landlocked Ethiopia. The international community is thus spending more than $6 million to improve port facilities in neighboring Djibouti and make improvements on the road from Djibouti to the Ethiopian border.

The government adamantly insists that the drought and the war are two separate issues that shouldn't be linked. "In Ethiopia, we do not wait to have a full tummy to protect our sovereignty," Meles declared last week. His government recently bought four new Russian-built Su-25 attack jets, each costing some $20 million.

Yet some here suggest government priorities are askew. "If the government would stop the war, it could use that money to feed the hungry," said Asmamaw Belay, the head relief official of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a member of ACT. "That would save the lives of drought victims and the government at the same time could keep on negotiating for peace."

There have been scattered reports of government-controlled food distribution being withheld until a community produces the requisite number of recruits, but relief officials say the incidents are few and probably don't reflect central government policy. Most admit that the war enjoys such popular support among ordinary Ethiopians - and the economic situation of the poor is so desperate - that the military easily fills its quotas. "The government doesn't have any problem getting enough soldiers," said Dereje Jemberu, the Dese-based director of development and relief work in the north of the country for the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, another member of ACT. "Yet that's another reason for the churches to manage aid distribution, because it eliminates any temptation to use it for political ends."

Ethiopia is a nation fractured by ethnic and linguistic differences, and the government in Addis Ababa faces a medley of armed opposition groups scattered around the country. One church official, who asked not to be identified, suggested the slowness of the government's response to drought conditions in some areas had been affected by political reasoning. "The government left us alone, ignoring all indications of drought, so that when we starve the rebels will also starve," the official said. "Starvation will be the ultimate mechanism to achieve a truce."

As Ethiopia and the international community scramble to provide food assistance and keep the current drought crisis from turning into a full-blown famine, many point to the Joint Relief Partnership (JRP), a network of church agencies that joined together to coordinate response to the famine in the 1980s, as one of the most efficient and effective ways to channel food assistance.

The JRP includes the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, and the Lutheran World Federation, all members of ACT. The Ethiopian Catholic Church and CRS are also JRP members.

According to Stein Villumstad, the assistant general secretary for policy and human rights of Norwegian Church Aid, the JRP is a model of efficient local cooperation. "These local organizations and churches represent the only alternate distribution system for food aid in the country," Villumstad said. "They're present on the ground and know what's really going on in Ethiopia."