Addis Ababa — The UN World Food Programme is warning that despite an early response by the international community to the consequences of Ethiopia's drought, 12.5 million Ethiopians continue to face starvation. The organisation says it still needs US$90 million in assistance to cover the organisation's 2003 emergency operation.
WFP's executive director James Morris is blunt: "We have not had enough support to give out a complete cereal ration in Ethiopia and we and our partners have been forced to reduce it from 15 kilos a month to 12.5 kilos. Currently we have commitments of about half of what we need for the new emergency operation. A threat of a pipeline break in September remains... I assure you cutting rations is an action we and our partners only take in desperation. Once again - because governments have failed to provide the aid needed - WFP is forced into an exercise in triage. Who will be fed? Who will go hungry?"
As if to mock the country's plight, on top of drought has come serious flooding in some areas. In the Somali region, in particular, some 90,000 people have been affected with household food stocks destroyed or washed away.
But in most of the affected parts of the country, farmers are facing a lack of both food and water - a legacy of 2002. Some farmers saw a total failure of their harvests last year. And drought does not only affect food production; it has a devastating impact on whole communities. Families say they cannot send their children to school, because they are hungry and cannot cope with the trek to school, let alone studying.
Wagdi Othman, is the WFP spokesman in Ethiopia based in the capital, Addis Ababa. He talked to Ofeibea Quist-Arcton about the impact of successive droughts on the country's people.
Would you please assess the current humanitarian situation in Ethiopia. In 2002, we were told that Ethiopia was facing possible famine. Is that still the case a few months into 2003?
We are still in the middle of a crisis. We have about 11 million people relying on food aid in Ethiopia. The drought has affected food production in almost the entire country. And if you look at a map of Ethiopia, from north to south, it is the eastern part of the country that has been severely affected by erratic and sometimes insufficient rains throughout last year.
Farmers in Ethiopia are now facing the lack of food and the lack of water that has been the legacy of the year 2002.
Which are the worst-affected provinces?
Oromiya Region is one of the hardest-hit regions in this country. It is the southern and central part of Ethiopia, a mainly farming region where most people are farmers and they produce most of the food for the country. They have been affected in the eastern part of Oromiya where some of the farmers saw a total failure of the harvest in 2002.
They had then to sell off all their assets, they had to sell off the one or two oxen that they had.
They even had to sell personal belongings. I even met one woman who told me that she sold the only bed she had. We saw at the end of 2002 a very dramatic situation where children and the elderly were really seriously affected by the lack of food.
And apart from Oromiya Province?
Apart from Oromiya, the second seriously hit part of the country is Tigre in the north. Then theres also part of Amhara and north and southern Wollo. These are normally the drought-prone regions of Ethiopia. They are densely populated areas of the country. They are highlands and people really rely on what they produce to be able to feed their families.
Unfortunately, in much of the country, that did not happen last year. Production was down about 25 percent overall in Ethiopia. That is a serious reduction in food production I this country. And nomadic people in the Afar and Somali region were also affected.
They really rely on water and grazing for their animals. They use milk for their children and also they eat the meat when they can afford it. But Afar was severely hit by two years of drought and in July we could see animals dying in their thousands all over Afar and the people were really affected, because they could not get the milk for their children and could not sell their animals to be able to buy cereals from the market.
In the Somali regions, we saw the migration of entire families out of the Somali regions in 2002 - towards Djibouti and Somaliland across the border. Now this was a really interesting phenomenon, because usually nomadic people will go with their animals in search of pasture and water in neighbouring areas.
But this time, because they knew the situation was so bad and they had no hope, they took their entire families and moved across the border to get food and water for themselves and for their animals. And that is not very good, because what we want to do at the World Food Programme, or what we always try to do, is to provide the food in time, so that people are not on the move, because when people are on the move, they get weaker and weaker and they usually die more quickly.
So how much food is the World Food Programme providing? And would you call the people you are assisting hungry or starving in the first half of 2003?
We are now taking care of the food needs of about 4.5 million people throughout Ethiopia. The rest of the food is in fact coming from donations given directly to the government, or to non governmental organisations operating in this country. What we do is to provide the people with, normally, about 15kg of food per person per month.
But because we have less food available, the government decided to reduce rations to 12.5kg. That is in fact very bad for the population, because they are not getting enough. Already they are already getting only one type of food, which is wheat. Wheat is not very nutritious. When we see that the nutritional situation of the people is going down, what we provide on top of the wheat is a corn and soya blend. Its a fortified nutritious food that we give especially to children, the frail and the elderly so that they can recover quickly from malnutrition.
The people currently assisted in Ethiopia - the 11.3 million people we are currently assisting - are just about surviving. They are not receiving a lot of food, or all the food they require, but they are just being kept alive, so that at the end of this year they will be able to harvest. They can then rebuild their lives and start again.
But what they are getting right now is just not enough to have a normal life. When you go to villages, for somebody who is not used to a situation like ours - like the people who are working with communities - if you look at people, youd say that the people are still malnourished, they are still not very fit.
Thats the problem. We can get just them the basics, we are not able to provide everything that the population needs.
So are we talking about subsistence rations for these millions of people in Ethiopia?
Let me be even more blunt. These are just survival rations. They can just survive on what we are giving them. Thats not enough to be able to lead normal lives. Its just to keep your family alive until you can get food for your family and yourself, until you can buy sugar and other things you need in life. They are just being given wheat and, when the situation is very bad, corn and soya blend supplementary food and a little bit of cooking oil sometimes. But really that does not reflect the food basket that people in Ethiopia have access to in normal times.
You have said that the Ethiopian government decided to reduce the rations from 15kg per person per month to 12.5kg. Why?
The main reason is because the government is worried that the food we currently have will not be enough to be supplied to the needy people, especially in the areas where the people are more affected than in other areas of the country.
Its a kind of automatic contingency plan by the government, saying "maybe we should reduce the rations and give just what the people need so that we can give them this food for a longer period." At the same time, they hope that donors will be able to provide the food so that these rations can be brought back to the normal levels.
Really, they are reducing the rations because they are forced to do it. Its not an option in fact, because they want they food they have currently to last longer.
How confident are you that the shortfall in food aid you still require will reach Ethiopia in time? And at this time let me ask you what effect the US-led war on Iraq has had on donations?
So far, we havent seen any effect of the war on the amount of food aid Ethiopian has received. Because maybe we were wise enough to alert the international community in time, before the start of the Iraq war, we got what was needed. With the current food aid available in the country, we can feed people until early August. From then, we will need food aid.
But because we know that bringing in food to Ethiopia takes between 2-3 months, we will need food to be arriving here by mid-June, so that we are able to put it in place in areas where it is needed and we can distribute it there.
And you must remember that its not as if we can have food immediately. Food is not shipped in by air. It comes from the US or European countries by ship. It can take sometimes up to 3-4 weeks to reach the port of neighbouring Djibouti. As you know, Ethiopia is landlocked, so from Djibouti you have to truck the food to the main warehouses and hubs in the country. And from there we take the food to the places where its needed. Because in June the main rainy season starts, most places will be inaccessible. Thats why we are repeating our message and appealing to the international community to provide the food as quickly as possible, so that we have the time to pre-position the food where its needed before the onset of the rainy season.
Last year, the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, said that because of the drought in Ethiopia, the prospect of famine could be worse than the famine of 1984. Firstly, has that materialised and, secondly, was it an accurate prediction?
Thank God it did not materialise. Why? Because the situation we had in 1984-85 is totally different from the situation we have today. Simply put, at that time the government was hiding the situation. It was an embarrassment that there was fighting all over the country and they wanted to hide the situation.
Today, we have excellent cooperation with the government. We have access to all parts of the country. We work together to assess the situation and we respond to the situation together. So its totally different. In '84-'85, humanitarian agencies were not even able to assess some of the areas. There were 'no-go' areas for NGOs and humanitarian agencies.
Today, we can go anywhere. We can assess the situation whenever we want and we work hand in hand with the government.
So why do you think Prime Minister Meles then make the comparison between the 1984 famine and the current crisis in Ethiopia?
I think he made the comparison because the numbers involved were so high. This is maybe the first time in history we have more than 11 million people in need of food aid. Usually, you have between 5-10 million people in need of food. But here in Ethiopia the numbers were so huge. We knew that 11.3 million people would need food aid and that 3 million people could have needed food aid some time in 2003.
When you add up those two figures, you get almost 15 million people. Thats about 20 percent of the Ethiopian population needing food aid and 20 percent of the population at risk of starvation and famine. That is huge when you look at this country.
So, really the prime minister was right in highlighting the situation and making that comparison. I think that alert and that message jolted donors into responding to the situation and we got the food aid needed. The prime minister made his appeal in November (2002) and by end of November and December, I think, we got most of the food we needed. So this was clearly a good message to give to donors.
He was not lying. When you looked at the figures and the assessment, if food had not been forthcoming, we might have had a famine by now.
So it was an early warning, sounding the alarm bells in time?
Absolutely! We have been criticised in the past for not giving the true picture, for not ringing the alarm bells early enough so that donors can respond. This time the humanitarian agencies and the Ethiopian government did sound the alarm bells in time, starting from July 2002. That gave donors the time to respond.
If its possible to compare the situations, how can you compare the drought in Ethiopia, and the numbers involved, to the drought affecting southern Africa?
If you take just the numbers of people affected or at risk of starvation, Ethiopia has about 14 million people at risk. And if you take all the six countries in southern Africa affected by drought, the numbers are the same.
It shows that in Ethiopia alone, we have almost the same numbers of people affected as in the whole of southern Africa. Thats a lot. But what is different is that, in Ethiopia, you dont have the other underlying problems exacerbating the situation in southern Africa. You dont have the same prevalence of HIV-Aids or a political situation that is hampering food distribution as you have in, say, Zimbabwe.
That comparison stops at the figures though. The magnitude of the situation is similar, but southern Africa has other problems that Ethiopia does not have.
What about the climate and what about the rains? Does 2003, so far, look promising for the rural farmers of Ethiopia? Will there be a normal planting season and harvesting season as far as you can predict at the moment? Will people have home-produced food to eat?
Normally you have a small rainy season, starting in February. Its called the belg season. It starts in February until the end of April, normally, or sometimes until mid-May. This year, we saw a good start to the belg rainy season, but it hasnt been as good as expected all over the belg region - thats in the highlands and the central part of the country and to some extent in the eastern part of Ethiopia.
For the moment, we havent seen good rains. But farmers are very wise people and they will tell you that they cannot judge a rainy season until they have the food in bags and stored in the warehouses. This is why we wait until the beginning of May, end of April, before we start judging the belg season. But the belg rains account for only for 5-10% of the total food production of the country.
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The main season is the meher season. The rains start in June and they end in October. In November and December, you have the harvest. If that harvest is good, Ethiopia can feed itself. But if its not good, then we might have an even bigger problem. And once farmers experience successive shocks and successive droughts, they plunge deeper into poverty and for them to recover is even more difficult, because then they will leave even more assets and they may become completely destitute, leave their lands and go into town to search for work. But they wont find work because the rate of unemployment in the country is high. There is no chance for them to get work anywhere. So you end up with children begging on the streets, parents not having work and girls perhaps forced into prostitution in the towns.
If this happens, you have an 'exploded' family that may never come together again. You have more destitute people living in the big towns who will not go back to their villages, adding to the problems that big urban centres have in this country.
How has the current food insecurity affected attendance at schools and other normal everyday activities? How normal a life can families live in the affected areas at present?
Drought is having a devastating effect on families and communities and villages. It is having also a major impact on the schooling of children. A lot of families have told us that they cannot send their children to school when they are already hungry. In most of Ethiopia, you have to walk at least two hours to reach your school. You have another two hours to get home.
Imagine a hungry child walking those distances without anything in his/her stomach. Its impossible.
And what is the purpose of a child sitting in a classroom when he/she cannot concentrate or follow what the teacher is saying? Weve been told in schools that teachers have noticed that when children are normally fed, they play around, they shout and you can hear a lot of noise at school. But currently in most of the schools in drought-affected areas, you dont hear children playing and you dont hear the noise of a normal schoolyard. Thats very bad because, even if they try and come to school, they cant get an education.
What is the most worrying phenomenon is that you have drought affecting children when they need food the most, when they need food to grow. Without food, there is no way for them to grow into normal adults. We know that when a child has been affected by drought, his ability to develop into an adult is jeopardised. You will have children who will not be able to lead a normal adult life if they have been affected by one, two, three droughts.
This cycle of natural disasters in Ethiopia is now shorter and shorter. We had a drought in 1999-2000 and now we have one in 2003-2003. And that is really short for farmers and their families to recover from these types of shocks.
So, ultimately, what is WFPs message, and hope?
What we hope is that this country will get normal rains, because 90 percent of food production in Ethiopia is based on rainfall. We hope that people will have other means of survival, even if they cannot live on their land, that they can find another type of work - say in cities - that something will be started so that they can get work and other means to help their families.
We also hope that donors will be more generous in other types of aid, because Ethiopia does not only need emergency aid. This country needs development aid and development money for other activities that are helping farmers and other Ethiopians to lead a normal life. We hope that money will be coming, so that Ethiopia can develop into a better country.
