Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
4 June 2003
interview
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 there’s 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. It’s 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, you’d say that the people are still malnourished, they are still not very fit.
That’s 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. That’s not enough to be able to lead normal lives. It’s 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.
It’s 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. It’s not an option in fact, because they want they food they have currently to last longer.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
