www.eastafricaforum.net http://www.ifrc.org/Docs/News/pr08/5308.asp
International Red Cross, Switzerland Ethiopia: drought victims increase as situation worsens
20 August 2008
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is launching a revised emergency appeal for 8.1 million Swiss francs (US$ 7.9 million / € 5 million) to support the Ethiopian Red Cross Society in assisting more than 76,000 people severely affected by drought in the southern Wolaiyta region.
Over the next six months, the Red Cross will provide emergency food and relief assistance, early recovery activities including improvement of access to safe water, and hygiene promotion.
The operation, which was launched in May to help some 40,000 people in Damot Pulasa, has now been extended to respond to the needs of an additional 36,000 villagers in neighbouring Damot Gale.
“Over the past two months the situation has worsened and living conditions have deteriorated. People have exhausted all their resources and are unable to feed themselves. We must step up our response,” says Lorenzo Violante, IFRC’s drought operations manager in Addis Ababa.
Food prices have risen by 330 per cent after a year of adverse climatic events. Floods in 2007 and water logging caused by the Meher rains destroyed most of the maize, millet, wheat, haricot and teff root crops. Failure of the Sapian, an extension of the Meher rains, has accentuated the crisis, and the 2008 failure of the Belg rains has resulted in catastrophic food insecurity and water shortages.
In Damota Pulasa, nearly half of the 54 hand-dug wells and 13 of the 39 shallow wells are out of operation. As a result, people must walk long distances to fetch water and the health of the population - particularly that of children aged under five years and of pregnant women and lactating mothers - is at risk.
“There are more than 16,000 acutely malnourished children in Damot Gale and Damot Pulasa, of whom 1,614 receive intensive care in therapeutic centres across the two regions. The situation can only deteriorate if we are not able to intervene efficiently,” warns Fasika Kebede, Secretary General of the Ethiopian Red Cross.
The Ethiopian Red Cross operation is designed to complement support from the government and other humanitarian organizations helping the families of children being treated in the therapeutic centres.
Food and seed distributions are underway in the two regions but more help is needed. The revised appeal will allow the procurement and distribution of 10,000 sheep as well as agricultural tools to prevent further damage to people’s livelihoods.
Longer term needs will be addressed through the IFRC’s Africa Food Security Initiative, a five-year plan covering 15 countries – including Ethiopia – which will develop food security programmes.
____________________ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rosemary_righter/article4568457.ece
The Times, UK Ethiopia -
another famine, another avoidable disaster
Population explosion and a misguided land policy - two reasons why Addis Ababa is the architect of its own misery
Rosemary Righter It was at a railway crossing near Diri Dawa, the provincial capital in the Ethiopian Ogaden desert, that I saw them: small children's hands, blackened by sun, clutching at the slats of a cattle truck dumped on a siding.
The year was 1984, the height of the Ethiopian famine that claimed about a million lives. These young things must have expired, hours later, of heat and thirst in temperatures peaking at about 48C, in the truck where they had deliberately been left to die.
I know it was deliberate because I took quick photographs, muttered a few words they couldn't understand, and headed in to Diri Dawa to get help. The famine relief office officials shrugged and directed me to the military police commander. He cut me short: yes, he knew where they were. They were ethnic Somali kids - Somalis, the majority population of the Ogaden, had been in rebellion against Ethiopian rule for years - and they had been caught throwing stones at a train.
But they would die, I persisted. He lit a cigarette. “So what: they knew the risks and they must pay the price.”
You did not have to be caught throwing stones to “pay the price” in 1984. That famine in the Ogaden, the worst-affected region in Ethiopia, was far deadlier than it need have been because, until the international outcry forced it somewhat to relent, the Marxist Mengistu dictatorship blocked food aid to rebel areas, using it as a weapon of war.
What the world saw back then they are seeing again: heart-rending photographs of wide-eyed famished Ethiopian children. What the world did not hear much about then was the criminal exploitation of suffering.
What the world will not see clearly, even now, is that disasters like drought can cause crops to fail, but should never, in a half-decently run country, lead to mass deaths from malnutrition. Famines in this day and age are man-made, if not by the sins of commission perpetrated by the thuggish Mengistu regime (and by North Korea's) then by culpable omission coupled with lousy policies.
Mengistu was overthrown in 1991, fleeing Addis Ababa to retire in the congenial climate of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Because Meles Zenawi, the Tigrayan rebel leader who ousted him, shed some of his Albanian-model Stalinist baggage, he was fêted by Westerners as a moderniser and showered with development aid.
A spot of election-rigging in 2005, followed by the shooting of up to 200 pro-democracy demonstrators, caused some temporary tut-tutting, after which aid quietly resumed and, in Britain's case, doubled.
Not so quietly, the Ethiopian Army is again cracking heads in the Ogaden, burning villages and, according to Human Rights Watch, torturing and publicly executing not only rebels of the resurgent Ogaden National Liberation Front but also civilians sympathising with them. In the Ogaden, famine looms. Plus ça change.
Still, Meles and Mengistu are not la même chose.
Meles is a bit of a thug, but he has introduced some judicial and commercial reforms, devolved powers from Addis Ababa to the regions, improved education, curbed child mortality through anti-poverty programmes and, importantly, advocated greater equality for women
. He has also ploughed 17 per cent of government spending into agriculture, three to four times as much as most other African governments. He claims that farm production is growing by 10 per cent a year, and boasts that, two years ago, the country actually exported maize (odd, that, when in a “good” year millions of Ethiopians rely on foreign food aid).
After the last big drought, in 2003, the Ethiopian Government worked with donors to create a system designed to make famine history. It includes a Productive Safety Net, a public works programme providing seven million poor Ethiopians - nearly a tenth of the population - with food or cash, and a Famine Early Warning System that measures rainfall, livestock prices, household spending and signs of malnutrition.
Textbook stuff, and in stark contrast with the junta's attempt to hide the 1984 famine from the world. And yet... how, then, has the failure of the “little rains” this spring, and the consequent loss of a single harvest, translated into a huge emergency affecting ten million people, by the aid industry's probably inflated account, and 4.6 million by the Government's defensively conservative assessment?
Why are its emergency grain reserves so depleted that food rations have been reduced by a third, at least 75,000 children are already severely malnourished and hunger affects two thirds of the country and has, this time, spread to the towns? Why is Ethiopia, a country with lush two-crop breadbaskets as well as deserts and eroded hill farms, still so vulnerable that, as Meles himself admits, “one unexpected weather event can push us over the precipice”?
There are two big causes, and drought is not one of them. They are within the power of politicians to tackle, and tackled they must finally be, with the requisite sense of urgency.
The first is Ethiopia's population explosion; with families averaging 5.4 children, it has soared from 33.5 million in the 1984 famine to 77 million now. In a country where 85 per cent of the people rely on farming for a living, this means that, per head, food production has actually fallen since 1984 - by more than a third - and farm plots get smaller and smaller.
A fifth of Ethiopian farmers try to survive on areas no more than 20 metres by 40 metres per person, yielding no more than half their cereal needs.
The second is Meles's purblind refusal to reverse the Marxist folly of his 1995 law that put all land under state ownership. “Land holding certificates” graciously permit farmers to till land that their forebears have farmed for generations; but surveys show that 46 per cent still expect to lose their farms.
The policy is a disaster. It discourages careful land management; it deprives farmers of collateral to raise bank loans to buy fertiliser and agricultural tools; and they cling to plots too small to feed their families because, with nothing to sell, they have no alternative. The coffee and infant rose-growing sectors apart, most Ethiopians farm as their ancestors did, with hoes, wooden ploughs, oxen and an anxious eye on the skies.
Enough food aid is once more pouring in to stave off serious famine; but it will not remedy Ethiopia's deepening aid dependency and rural despair. With a smaller - because more mobile - landowning rural population, able to access loans to invest in higher-yield seeds, tractors and drip irrigation, Ethiopia could feed itself. But will donor governments champion the farmers' right to get back their land? On past experience, pigs will fly. And the next famine will be a matter of time.
Rosemary Righter is an associate editor of The Times
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http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2008-08-19-voa26.cfm VOA Latest Peace Effort on Somalia May Fall Short
Joe DeCapua
19 August 2008
The Somalia Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and a faction of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) signed the Djibouti Agreement Tuesday in an effort to speed the peace process. But how effective will it be?
For an analysis of the Djibouti Agreement for Somalia, VOA English to Africa Service reporter Joe De Capua spoke to George Washington University Professor David Shinn, who's also a former US ambassador to Ethiopia. He questions how the agreement will affect the peace process.
"It gives me hope that it's still moving forward. It's important to keep in mind, however, that there are two factions of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia. There is the group in Djibouti, moderates, who signed this document. And there's another group, hardliners if you will, located in Asmara, Eritrea, who are not part of the process.
And the hardliners apparently control most of the al-Shabab militia units in Somalia, who are causing a lot of the problem in terms of security, especially in Mogadishu," he says.
Ambassador Shinn says while it moves the peace process between the TFG and its more moderate opponents, there are some problems with the Djibouti agreement.
"It is I think a little bit unrealistic in a couple of points. For example, it calls upon the international community to move forward with humanitarian assistance in Somalia. And there certainly is a great need for that. The problem is that the Shabab component in Somalia is continuing its attacks on the humanitarian workers and making it very, very difficult to properly distribute humanitarian assistance in the country," he says.
Another issue is the call to speed up deployment of a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia, which Shinn says may be just "wishful thinking." He says, "Even if that were to happen, it's many months away and timing is critical in terms of re-establishing security in Somalia.
And it's even a question mark whether the United Nations is in a position to come up with enough troops to make any difference whatsoever."
The communiqué issued by both parties Tuesday welcomes peace efforts within and without Somalia. It also condemns violence against innocent civilians, including killings, looting, rape and piracy.
"It says all the right things. The question is whether either the Transitional Federal Government or this moderate faction of the ARS is in a position to carry out those objectives. And I think in some cases they're probably not able to do that," he says.
Ambassador Shinn says the ARS faction that signed the Djibouti Agreement must attract more moderate support within Somalia itself.
To do that, he says, it would have to convince Somalis that Ethiopian forces would leave the country soon and that there was a good chance for peace. He says that's a very difficult thing to do since it does not control the powerful al-Shabab element.________________
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