25 years ago Ethiopia suffered one of the worst famines in its history. Around one million people starved to death. Today, Ethiopia and the rest of Africa continues to suffer from severe food shortages and failed rains. Nick Martlew reports from Ethiopia.
As we drove through Eastern Ethiopia just a couple of days ago, my eyes were drawn for miles through dramatic valleys and up stony mountains. One of my colleagues had just arrived and her camera was snapping happily from the backseat.
We were travelling between the towns of Jijiga and Dire Dawa, but similar scenes are to be seen all over the country at the moment. For many Ethiopian farmers and herders, this is far from the first time they’ve faced drought.
I remember a woman I met when visiting an Oxfam project way up in the north, in Tigray. Heymanot is a farmer who has had to look after her family and fields on her own since her husband died. “The past three years the rain has come late and stopped early. People’s problems accumulate, they pile up year after year,” she told me.
The problems pile up. I’ve been living in Ethiopia less than a year but I’ve watched with others as the rains have failed and the hunger has grown. I can’t imagine what it’s like for farmers to see drought coming year in, year out, to see the cycle repeated and each year the problems get bigger.
When this happens, the stock response of the international community is to ship in emergency food aid. This saves the lives of people facing hunger now, but it does almost nothing to reduce the need for food aid next year. And it smacks of being taken by surprise.
But there is nothing surprising about drought in Ethiopia. They happen regularly, and with the climate changing, they are likely to happen even more in future. Abnormal events such as droughts are gradually becoming the norm here.
That’s why we need a new approach to disasters, an approach laid out in Oxfam’s new report - ‘Band Aids and Beyond’. Ethiopians don’t want to have to wait for food after a drought hits; they want help to prepare for drought in advance, to make sure that a dry season does not mean a disaster.
Take Heymanot’s village, Adiha. A few years ago, her community only had enough food for nine months a year. Oxfam intervened with our partner, a local organisation called REST. In exchange for food, the community worked to build a dam that now provides irrigation to the whole village. Before, they didn’t have enough to feed themselves. Now, the villagers have enough for themselves – and enough extra to sell and pay for their children’s education and health care.
Preparing in advance rather than waiting for disaster – this is not a complicated idea. It’s common sense. So why is it not common practice? Yet only a tiny fraction of the money that international donors spend on food aid is spent on these kinds of projects.
Not only is it common sense – projects that build the bridge from humanitarian relief to development are also much better value. For every $1 of US food aid, it costs up to $2 to package it and ship it over to Ethiopia. And when it gets there it does little to help development or avert the next drought. If the US and other governments are concerned about cost-effectiveness in this time of economic turmoil, then there are plenty of savings to be made here. Other countries can also improve the way they give aid to Ethiopia. Donors like the UK and the Netherlands too often see in split-vision: they see disasters, and they see long-term development. But what about the bit in between?
Tackling the risk of disasters, preparing communities to deal with drought and flood – this makes sense for finance ministers in rich countries, but most importantly it’s what Ethiopians are after. It’s more dignified and more sustainable.
As Tsegay, another farmer in Adiha, told me: “We get the sense that everyone wants to focus on giving out food – but it’s our development.”
The farmers who work hard to grow crops, only to see them wilt under the scorching sun, don’t want handouts. They want a hand up. Now let’s make their vision our own and put an end to the cycle of disastrous droughts.
Read the report ‘Band Aids and Beyond’.
take a look at the Ethiopia Climate Hearing.
Tags: Band Aid, Band Aids and Beyond, climate change, Ethiopia
