Famine in Ethiopia. Who/what is to blame?

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

I suppose everyone has already heard about the extremely dire situation in the Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia. The drought and famine there. But here I will talk about Ethiopia. Some may remember the drought in Ethiopia from the 80's. Well now Ethiopia is again threatened by disaster. And everyone is looking for somebody, or something to blame. Some are attributing this situation to climate change which has caused severe drought, others are focusing more on the terrible political conditions in the region. I think that as it usually happens, the truth is somewhere in the middle. It is a combination of both.

Of course, for those who are finding difficulties to visualise where the Horn of Africa is, here:



The UN aid coordinator Valerie Amos came to Addis Ababa with a message to the international community requesting to provide additional supplies of foods to the countries in the region. She just returned from Somalia and reported about thousands of women leaving the region carrying their starving children in their arms. Most children were severely underfed. They had walked for days without putting anything in their mouth. The nomads are losing their livestock and with it, their only means of livelihood.

What is worse, the food problem was supposed to be solved by now. Last year the Ethiopian prime minister Zenawi officially announced that one of the main priorities in his government's 5-year plan was not just to provide enough food for domestic needs, but also to start exporting to the neighbouring countries. Moreover, the food production was supposed to double by 2015. But reality looks very different now. As early as February the government had to ask UN for urgent aid for more than 3 million threatened people. And they are probably much more than what the official data says.

But what is causing this disastrous situation? Climate or politics? For years, Ethiopia has been announcing two-digit growth which the IMF then usually fixes and downgrades. But still a growth. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Ethiopians depends on food aid. The main reason is said to be the drought that happened after the much awaited rain season which never came last year. Drought has become a chronic disease of the entire region in recent decades. To make it worse, access to the most severely affected regions in Somalia is very complicated because many of the communities there are in the middle of the endless civil war.

But nature is only half of the story. The other half is the weak or non-existent policy of the governments in the region and the lack of resources to deal with a crisis which by far exceeds the capabilities of a single country. It is no surprise that the least developed regions are the most affected. And those are the most politically marginalised regions. Another factor is the giving of large portions of the arable land to foreign investors for the production of biofuels and foods for export. While the local population is starving and cannot afford to get access to any of it.

After the sharp criticism of the so called "land destruction" by agro firms from India, China and Saudi Arabia, the state investments agency of Ethiopia decided to terminate some of the lease contracts with those companies and is now trying its best to achieve more transparency. In the future these contracts will be publicly announced and will be accessible to anybody who wants to investigate them. But this is only part of what has to be done overall.

The organisational woes aside, more efforts need to be done to introduce drought-resistant crops, predominantly for domestic use. The now existent crops are not diverse enough and the risks of total crop failure like this year's are high. These efforts are in a dead end at the moment, and not so much for the lack of political will to do it, but because of the conservative food habits of the local people.

Even today 80% of the Ethiopians are mainly occupied with agriculture. If the country really wants to confront the famine problem, the government should concentrate more on the people. It must start by decentralising the food production and then stimulating the millions of small farms with comprehensive measures to provide better access to a new variety of crop seeds. Otherwise this situation will be coming back every next year, and with increased severity.

And to those who are ready to say "Why should this concern me", well you know that in a globalised world the problems in one region soon spread over to other regions, cause unrest, immigration, humanitarian crises, and ultimately, lots and lots of unforeseen consequences that sooner or later come to bite us all on the back in one form or another. And dealing with it all becomes much more difficult, if not even impossible at that point, because it's too late and very little had been done while it had been early.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think one of the most basic problems concerning better food supplies for that reason *are* the endless civil wars. At the most basic it can be extremely hard to assure consistent food supplies if whatever food you've grown is likely to be nabbed by some local warlord to feed his troops at the expense of your own. Climate change amplifies the issue but the most basic cause of the famine IMHO would be the political situations and their intractability. There are no societies on the planet that can produce food surpluses in a prolonged war.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

This is true, and it fully applies to Somalia. But what about Ethiopia? There is no armed conflict there and in fact the government is in control of the entire territory. It is even excessively centralised.

Of course the war in neighbouring Somalia is a factor but not the main one in Ethiopia's case. The ineffective way the land is being used, is. And the natural disaster. They are only now starting to realise the potential severity of the problem.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that the over-centralized political system overseeing ineffective use of land is the problem WRT Ethiopia. Of course it doesn't help where Somalia's concerned that they have a Baghdad Bob denying the problem of famine even exists there.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Let us clarify that you are referring to this (http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Somalia-Central-Government-Condemns-Militants-Famine-Denial-126057038.html).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That I am, yes.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

Sadly it is so much easier to assign blame than to solve the problem, especially for those who are not directly affected.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Always your fault, never mine.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Yeah he'll probably pull this over in the last year of his tenure. Just like Obama, amirite?

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

I am glad someone finds amusement in this story.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Those 5 year plans worked beautifully under communism.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

They seem to be for the Chinese...

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Seems to me the situation was indirectly caused by coincidence. You have a government that is trying to make fundamental changes, such as earning tax money and creating jobs by exporting crops that in theory will give them the necessary funding to secure their own population. If they had sufficient precious minerals or oil they would use that, but apparently they don't. Unfortunately right from the start they were hit with a drought, and the government does not have the resources to carry the nation through it. The result is a catastrophic setback.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Should take into account that Ethiopia has taken in huge numbers of immigrants frum Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea in the last decade. Many of whom have started to return back to their home country.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how this reflects on the draught and famine.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

It's further strain on the stressed system.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

OK, but how would the departure of more stomachs to feed be a strain? Wouldn't it be just the opposite, an easening of the burden?

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

The OP listed some of the reasons for the famine. The OP did not mention because of Ethiophia accepting immigrants, it has added additional strain and the country was unable to keep up the demand. This is only one of several reasons for the famine.

Only now that there is famine are immigrants STARTING to leave. Sudanese have new option of returning to South Sudan. Easing the famine is of course made easier with fewer mouths to feed. But this is only part of the solution and the OP makes some good points.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Everything is a beautiful tapestry. Socialist command and control economy wrecks the market. Vicious civil war destroys civil society. Kleptocratic, unaccountable governments abuse and misappropriate local resources. Misguided foreign aid stunts local initiative. Mother Nature then turns her back on the region, putting the icing on a huge cake of fail.

What to do? What to do? What must be done we are not willing to do, nor do we have the resources to do it, were the will available.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

I must have missed something. Mother nature punishes everybody for their wicked ways? Am I getting this right?

Yes, what to do? You came short of proposing anything. That is what almost everyone does - only complaining about how bad things are and never going any further. Then they go about their everyday business as if nothing is happening. Cynicism is very convenient.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Mother Nature is just a metaphor, unless I am mistaken. What I mean is that the drought is just the final nail in the coffin (another metaphor) driven in by the forces of nature, but made truly horrific by the actions of man, who built the coffin, placed the lid and drove home the other nails. A drought of this size would stress any country, but a free country with a strong economy, with an accountable government that was interested in the welfare of its people in its mind, would not be in the position Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia are in today. What would have been a stress is magnified into a epic disaster. Imagine this kind of drought hitting somewhere like, Australia.

What needs to be done is the imposition of law and order on the region and then the systematic liberation of the people from corrupt tribal and clan leadership. That requires killing a lot of people very violently, often with the help of other people who might not be very nice. It requires that we utterly destroy their way of life and disrupt the way they relate to the world, the foundations of their culture have to be relaid. True, most of people who we'll kill are very bad people and its true that most of the culture we'll be destroying is very bad culture, but I doubt we have the stomach for it.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Maybe because there are still moral brakes to doing things like that. Like: don't kill, etc. Or what do I know? Politics and ethics are like water and oil.

I do not think today any nation-building effort is being done for the sake of freedom and liberty of some distant people. It is all about economic interests. If you can find a good economic and geopolitical excuse to meddle into Ethiopia, you will. Here is real cynicism for you.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Maybe because there are still moral brakes to doing things like that.

What does morality say about just letting people kill and oppress other people and not trying to stop them? Better or worse? Maybe we should ask the people of Srebrenica.

If you can find a good economic and geopolitical excuse to meddle into Ethiopia, you will.

As the people of Rwanda will tell you, this is true. Of course, I don't see anyone else jumping on the altruism bandwagon.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

Srebrenica is in Bosnia. NATO did not attack Milosevic until he touched Kosovo, which is a very strategic hub for arms and drugs trafficking. Drugs originating in Afghanistan, by the way.

You do not see people jumping on the altruism bandwagon but I do. I work with some of them most of the time.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

By people I don't mean individuals. There a always many good, honest and earnest people who want to help the poor and hungry. Some of them even do worthwhile and important work relieving suffering. Respeck. What I mean is people who matter. People with heavy lift capacity air forces and blue water navies.

[raichu100.livejournal.com]

I find problems like this overwhelming. O.O