Severe “food insecurity” in Ethiopia has put an estimated 4.8 million people at risk
HRAYKEDENEW would prefer to forget the dark days of 1985 but sometimes the memories tumble forth unbidden.
She remembers her family, desperate for anything that would fill their stomachs, boiling strips of leather to make it easier to swallow. Weeks later, as the final stages of starvation set in, her parents lay down on their bed and never got up again. Three of her siblings also perished.
Hraykedenew (37) still lives in Korem, the highland town that became synonymous with Ethiopia’s devastating famine 25 years ago after the BBC’s Michael Buerk arrived to discover what he famously described as a “biblical famine, now, in the 20th century”. Hraykedenew is married with six children.
“We are living a better life,” she says. “We pray to God we will not see days like that again.”
Ethiopia’s famine ended with nearly 1 million dead, and while the country has experienced much political and economic change in the decades since, the fear of hunger has never really gone away in this, sub-Saharan Africa’s second most-populous nation. Korem today has all the appearance of a thriving town, with boisterous children spilling from gaily painted houses ringed by lush fields of maize and barley, but the surrounding region of Tigray is one of several pockets of Ethiopia where food shortages are a familiar reality – a situation many believe will worsen this year.
In December the Ethiopian government identified an estimated 4.8 million people who will need emergency food assistance from January to June.
That is in addition to more than 7 million people who depend on a government-managed but foreign-funded “safety net” programme that supplies food in exchange for work.
“The current situation is far from qualifying as a famine as some media outlets have stated but there is severe food insecurity in certain areas,” says Judith Schuler of the World Food Programme. “We expect a deterioration of the situation within the next six months.”
The effect of successive seasons of failed rains goes some way in explaining why Ethiopia finds itself in this current predicament, but even when the rains come and harvests are bountiful, nearly one tenth of its people rely on food aid to survive. Other deeper, structural – and much debated – factors are at play, including rapid population growth and the impact of government land policy.
Since the 1980s famine, Ethiopia’s population has doubled to almost 80 million.
In a country where some 85 per cent rely on farming for a living, using methods unchanged over centuries, this means farm holdings have become smaller and smaller, and meagre harvests must be stretched further.
Some analysts argue that efforts to boost agricultural development are hamstrung by 1990s legislation that put all land under state ownership, a policy they say discourages initiative and stifles productivity.
The issue of food security can be a prickly one in Ethiopia, with many Ethiopians resentful that their country’s name still conjures up images of famine and war in the wider world, particularly at a time when it is attracting tentative but growing interest from foreign investors.
Prime minister Meles Zenawi points to overall economic growth rates of more than 7 per cent per year. He argues that efforts to boost agriculture are bearing fruit, noting that areas where there is generally adequate rainfall have experienced sustained growth in agricultural production for several years. But that, he admits, is not enough.
"We ought to and we should be able to also break this structural bottleneck in the drought-affected areas. The reason we have not achieved that is primarily because it takes a lot of money ... to kickstart development in those areas," he told The Irish Times.
“We are making those investments and they are beginning to make a difference but it is not fast enough. Unless you break the structural barriers you will always be in this whirlwind of emergency programmes. We have done much of the work but not all of it. We need to do the rest.”
On the population issue – described to me by one development worker in Addis Ababa as “the elephant in the room” – Meles acknowledges the need for a “sensible population policy” and insists that it is already in place. “Population growth rates in Ethiopia are beginning to come down and we will maintain that policy – not because we believe in this doomsday scenario of Ethiopia being unable to feed anything more than 80 million people, but because we believe that a stable process of population growth – rather than the massive growth we had – could be brought about in Ethiopia, and such an environment would be many times more conducive to not only feeding Ethiopians but making them prosperous. After all, that is the ultimate objective.”