Ofeibea Quist-Arcton
4 June 2003
(Page 2 of 2)
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 haven’t 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 it’s 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 it’s needed. Because in June the main rainy season starts, most places will be inaccessible. That’s 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 it’s 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 it’s 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. That’s 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 it’s 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. That’s a lot. But what is different is that, in Ethiopia, you don’t have the other underlying problems exacerbating the situation in southern Africa. You don’t 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. It’s 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 hasn’t been as good as expected all over the belg region - that’s in the highlands and the central part of the country and to some extent in the eastern part of Ethiopia.
For the moment, we haven’t 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.
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 it’s 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 won’t 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. It’s 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? We’ve 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 don’t hear children playing and you don’t hear the noise of a normal schoolyard. That’s very bad because, even if they try and come to school, they can’t 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 WFP’s 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.
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