Uprooting the
Root Causes of Famine in Ethiopia
By Dr. Ghelawdewos Araia
Nov 3, 2002
Uprooting the Root Causes of Famine in Ethiopia
Ghelawdewos
Araia
I am
grateful to those concerned Ethiopians who have taken the initiative to extend
their relief support to the starving fellow Ethiopians. In point of fact, one
of these concerned Ethiopians is the Houston based group and I, for one,
wholeheartedly endorse their noble initiative.
However,
while appreciating relief efforts, the main theme of this Article is ‘uprooting
famine once and for all.’ Therefore, I will thematically highlight development
strategies to eradicate famine from the Ethiopian landscape. In order to make a
more meaningful discourse on the conquest of famine, I shall first address the
misconceptions surrounding the causes of mass starvation.
It is an
elementary notion and quite obvious even to the uninitiated that the
disappearance of rain can cause drought and subsequent famine in Ethiopia. But,
it is also abundantly clear that the culprit behind drought and widespread starvation
is not as such lack of rain but the vulnerability of a given society that
wholly depends on a rain-fed agriculture. The incredible irony is, while
Ethiopia encounters drought and famine almost every decade (now perhaps every
half a decade) despite the blessings of hundreds of major rivers and thousands
of streams, Egypt with an ecology that does not witness rainfall and the
country depending on the Nile waters of Ethiopia, is a major exporter of food
crops, especially beans.
By the
same token, China and India, once known
as lands of famines, now (thanks to their sound government policies and
development strategies) they have not only gone beyond rain-fed agriculture, harnessed their
waterways, and diversified their economies, but also became relief donors
themselves.
Nature as
a whole and climate in particular are not to be blamed for the cyclical famines
if we critically examine it in light of
the living examples of countries mentioned above that managed to defeat hunger
successfully. If we continue to blame nature for the causes of the Ethiopian
famine (whether this conceptual framework is cynical or engendered by genuine
ignorance is immaterial), we shall miserably fail to understand the vagaries of
famine and possibly come up with a wrong diagnosis and hence wrong
prescription.
In order
to have clarity on the phenomenon of famine, we must first be able to combat
ambiguous, elliptical, and seductive explanations of the Ethiopian famine. Put
otherwise, we must avoid sentimental and superficial analysis of mass
starvation shrouded in mysticism and religious overtones.
Once we
begin to see beyond the rather seductive and ironic depictions of the famine
encounter, we will be in a position to recapture a glimpse of the real causes
of famine and cautiously avoid the conflation of natural calamities with
‘man-made’ famines. It is from this standpoint that I like to argue that the
Ethiopian famine is largely caused by human forces and not by nature, and to be
sure far from starving, Ethiopians should have enjoyed the fruits of a
breadbasket from “Garden of Eden.” (See
my argument in The Paradox of Bread
Basket Starving Ethiopia, September 2002
).
The
‘Garden of Eden’ and/or ‘Bread Basket’ theories are corroborated by the Pan
African News Agency (Dakar, February 8, 2001) as aptly put in its report: “It
may sound paradoxical, but as informed sources at the Global Environment
Facility (GEF) assert, starving Ethiopia could well pass for the world’s seed
basket! The very mention of Ethiopia readily evokes sad images of raging
battles and starving children – of a people bereft of the bare necessities of
food, clothing and tranquility. The last likely image is that of a nation whose
farming practices help provide food and jobs in places as far away as Europe, Asia,
and North America. Yet this largely unknown profile is a vital part of
Ethiopia’s complex reality.”
Ethiopian
scholars and professionals (experts in agronomy, rural development, development
economics, political economy, and related fields) have an opportunity to seize
the moment and explore the true profile of the Ethiopian enigma and
contradictions of a famine prone society. This complex and complicated scenario
will ultimately be unraveled, though I gather there will be a tacit collusion
with the powers that be and other global interests who wanted to bury the truth
in the arid zones of Ethiopia.
In any
event, in spite of the hidden profile of Ethiopia, the cruel irony is that the
country is unable to feed its own people. What is to be done to stamp out
famine from Ethiopia? In one of my
articles (Combating Future Famines in
Ethiopia, East African Forum, April 2000), which I still consider relevant
to the current situation in Ethiopia, I have posed the following questions and
attempted to discuss them vis-à-vis the relapsing hunger and the miserable
condition of the Ethiopian people:
“What can
we do to deny famine a future in Ethiopia? Can we really conquer famine and
usher development agendas for the 21st century? To answer the above
questions, we need to seriously engage ourselves in addressing strategies for
development in Ethiopia, the only sure way to stamp out famine from the
Ethiopian landscape…”
The
precondition to development and the eradication of famine in Ethiopia, should,
as a matter of course, entail ‘ecological awareness’ that will enable
Ethiopians to preserve the remaining forests (only 2.7% of the original forest
is now in existence) and replenish the now barren lands with a massive
reforestation program. Planting trees, however, is not enough unless
supplemented by a sustainable and stringent forest management program.
The
second major undertaking that Ethiopia must consider is to harness the major
rivers and utilize them for irrigation and hydroelectric purposes. In this regard,
some projects were developed during the Derg regime and the present government
of Ethiopia, but it is not adequate when it comes to the conquest and
eradication of famine. Irrigation will enable Ethiopia to bid farewell to
rain-fed agriculture but it is not going to be an easy development strategy,
for it will require a huge capital intensive initiative. But it does not mean
it is not realizable at all. With sound public policy, domestic devotion, and
international aid, Ethiopia can successfully overcome the drawbacks of a
rain-fed agriculture.
Irrigation
also will have its side effects. There are some scientists who are opposed to
the extensive use of water through irrigation, because the latter cause
salinity and sedimentation problems. However it is better to use irrigation and
pay the price of ‘silt and salt’ later than depend on rain-fed culture and
suffer mass starvation. After all, desalination programs can drastically lessen
this problem and also help prevent the destruction of algae and midges, which
are sensitive to salinity.
On top of
the above two major undertakings, Ethiopia can also consider scientific methods
to combat drought and famine that I have cited in The Politics of Famine and Strategies for Development in Ethiopia (
Doctoral dissertation) and that is also recommended by the US National Academy
of Sciences:
. Expansion of water supply through such means as publicly
financed irrigation
projects,
water catchment projects, wells and desalination efforts.
. Expansion
of both central and local, on site food storage facilities to reduce waste
through improved handling and distribution techniques and to facilitate pest
control.
. Crop
selection substitution and multiple cropping development activity over an
extended period and should consider a middle and long-term effort.
Similar recommendations were made by the FAO dry
land agronomist P. T. S. Whiteman who undertook “Agronomy Research in Drought
Affected northern Ethiopia.” In 1977.
Incidentally, one off the objectives of the Whiteman team was to
“conduct observation on soil-water-plant relationships and introduce and test
measures likely to conserve moisture and/or enhance the efficiency of its use.”
Most
importantly, famine can be defeated with certainty if a holistic and highly
diversified development package is seriously considered to overhaul the
Ethiopian economy and lead the country toward a sustainable agricultural and
industrial development. In this context, the ‘agriculture-led industrial
development’ is a suitable policy and development agenda if fully implemented
to realize a situation beyond famine.
Diversification
of the economy could embark Ethiopia on the threshold of ‘denying famine a
future,’ but it could not be a guarantee unless the country makes a transition
from a mono-culture agriculture to a multi-cropping system with emphasis on
food crops, and this transition will certainly serve as a lynchpin for
industrial development.
Once the
cornerstone of the above development
strategies is laid, it would be of utmost importance to consider the
participation of the Ethiopian peasants so that they themselves could
experience food self-reliance. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, in their
remarkable book Food First: Beyond the
Myth of Scarcities, have promoted insightful ideas that are essential to
grassroots rural development and food self-reliance:
1. Food self-reliance requires
the allocation of control over agricultural resources to local,
self-provisioning units, democratically organized.
2. Food self-reliance depends on
mass initiative, not on government directions.
3. With food self-reliance,
trade becomes an organic outgrowth of development, not the fragile hinge on
which survival hangs.
4. Food self-reliance requires
coordinated social planning.
The
participatory mobilization of the Ethiopian peasants, as we shall see below, is
prerequisite to the overall food security and the ultimate objective of
uprooting the root causes of famine. In relation to the “social security of
food”, I am tempted to recommend the reader to have a look at a very important
book by R. E. Downs et al entitled Political
Economy of African Famine (Food and Nutrition in History and Anthropology,
1992) and read especially Chapter Two, “Cultural Construction in a “Garden of
Eden”: The Influence of Ontological Acquiescence in an African Development
Projects and Its Implications for Food Security.” Any open minded and sincerely
concerned person can get the gist of what I am trying to emphasize in this
article.
Having
made clear what we must do to defeat famine, we can now turn to the
significance and importance of relief measures for our fellow Ethiopians. This
too requires some scientific explanation as opposed to sentimental depiction of
famine which is intertwined with mirage sensations (obscurantism!).
There are plethora of perspectives on relief
operations, but we can confine ourselves, at least for now, to only four
“schools” of thought that I have discussed in my previous works and that were
inspired by Thomas Stephens: 1) Relief as Humanitarian Task, sees disaster in
terms of unexpected human deprivation;
2) Relief as a Managerial Task, sees the problem of disaster relief
stemming from the need for bringing
coherence and order to relief operations; 3) Relief as Development Task: If
assistance is to be effective, it must concentrate on pre-disaster planning and
preparedness and from an integral component of the overall development plan; 4)
Relief as Confrontational Politics: the government policy of the donor country
may see relief assistance as a means of
obtaining influences with the recipient country’s government.
From the
above “schools” of thought, Relief as Development Task comes very close to
the central theme of this article, and Ethiopians
must not lose sight of the significance and relevance of this form of relief in
the struggle to wipe out famine for good. ‘Relief as Development Task’ is
inextricably linked to crisis management in wide spread famines and relief
operations.
In Anatomy of Disaster Relief, Randolf C.
Kent discusses disaster in three phases:
1.
1.
Emergency phase: entails measures to ensure the immediate survival of
victims. At this phase, ideology becomes irrelevant and the humanity school
prevails.
2.
2.
Rehabilitation phase: assistance of materials to rebuild housing,
provision of seeds and equipment to produce crops, to dig wells etc.
Rehabilitation is concerned with those basic steps required to restore the
community to a point where it can stand on its feet again.
3.
3.
Post-rehabilitation: overlaps with general approach to development. This
stage may also promote pre-disaster planning by community organizations.
On top of the above disaster
phases, other important criteria for relief are:
1.
1.
Preparedness: usually incorporated within ‘National Disaster Plans’
critical resource lists maintained and updated, emergency simulation exercise
undertaken, risk areas monitored and Early Warning Systems (EWS)developed.
2.
2.
Prediction: Famine indicators can now be analyzed with more accuracy,
thanks to technological advancement and the interplay of the latter with
socioeconomic understanding. Satellites can now detect pre-famine syndromes
such as soil erosion and deforestation.
3.
3.
Assessment: must include at least the following: provision of food,
transport, medical supplies, water supply, financial supply; the condition of
rainfall, crop production, and market prospects; aid for relief and
rehabilitation
4.
4.
Appropriate Intervention: follows ‘Assessment’. If the assessment is
correct and reflects the social and economic complexities of the famine
situation, it will enable domestic and external relief workers to intervene
accordingly.
5.
5.
Timely Intervention: if aid is not received on time, i.e. when the
famine victims needed it most, it is not aid. Timely intervention also includes
when to stop aid; it is not only an awareness when aid should be delivered. The
objective is to defeat famine and not create permanent beggars! Hence, our ‘Post-rehabilitation’
phase mentioned above.
6.
6.
Coordination: is by far the most important tool in the criteria of
relief, but cannot be effective without the other five criteria.
Ethiopia is a poor developing
country suffering intermittently from famines of great proportions. As per the
UNDP Human Development Indicators 2002, Ethiopia ranks # 168; the life
expectancy at birth is 43.9, human development index (HDI) is 0.327, adult
illiteracy rate 60.9 %, population not using improved drinking water is 76%,
population below income poverty line (1983-2000) is 76.4%, people living with
HIV/Aids: women number up to 1,100,000 and children up to 230,000, and traditional fuel consumption as % of total
energy use is 95.9.
The UNDP Report is a wake up call
for all of us and it is for this simple reason that we need to seriously engage
ourselves in any way we can for the development of Ethiopia. Ethiopia may have exhibited some “stride in
economic growth,” but the latter is meaningless unless it is meant to consciously
design a development package that, in
turn, is geared toward the final blow of famine.
Concluding Remark: As I have
indicated in Combating Future Famines in
Ethiopia, “it must be known that the conquest of famine in Ethiopia is a
mammoth historical task and it should not be left to squarely fall on the
shoulders of the Ethiopian authorities. The Ethiopian intellectual and
professional in the Diaspora must be willing to contribute in the
reconstruction and development of Ethiopia, and the government must create a
fertile ground and incentive so that Ethiopians can demonstrate commitment.
Collectively, we must deny famine a future in Ethiopia.”