Ronnie on Politics

We’ve all seen the photos of skeletal Ethiopians, especially children, with sunken faces and painfully thin bodies, in the newspapers or on the evening news. At least eight million Ethiopians are likely to suffer hunger or starvation this year, a crisis that could rival the 1984 famine that killed at least a million people. This is the nations fifth famine in the last 30 years. There were three basic factors that caused this famine: a nation wide drought, wide spread poverty, and a war between Ethiopia and its neighbor Eritrea.

Drought is the chief cause of famine in Ethiopia and has devastated the country every decade or so for the past 100 years. The failure of rains over the past three to four years has lead to the most recent famine. Some aid experts suspect Ethiopia’s droughts are coming more frequently, and perhaps more intensely. A review of regional climate data indicates that some changes are taking place with the climate. The most commonly held belief is that El Nino and La Nina are the cause of these droughts while others blame Global Warming. No matter what the cause, the results are the same. Crops have withered and died, leaving millions of people with little or no food. There are reports of increasing deaths of cattle due to water shortages and lack of pasture. Once the cattle and crops are gone, the people are not only left with little or no food, but also with no means of income.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. Half of its growing population, which doubled its size since the 1984 famine to over 50 million inhabitants, lives in poverty. On average the family income is $130 per year with most of the population depending on their crops for food. During periods of drought, when crops are ruined, many people starve because they lack the money to purchase food. During the 1980's about one million Ethiopians, including many children, died from starvation. Although massive aid programs are under way, even those receiving aid are getting so little that many have turned to drastic measures to survive, such as eating roots, or selling goats and chickens that are their only long-term dependable source of food. The aid that has arrived may have come to late for the most severely effected people.

We may never know how many Ethiopians starved while waiting for food to arrive from international relief agencies. Relief shipments were severely hampered because the Ethiopian government refused to allow aid to be shipped through the ports of its enemy, Eritrea, after a border war broke out in May 1998. This war was fought over a sparsely populated plain around the village of Badme. Both countries insist Badme falls on their side of the geographically invisible borderline, and they appear willing to commit tens of thousands of lives as well as millions of dollars to win the argument. It was pressure from many international aid agencies that finally brought the war to an end on May 25, 2000, and opened the Eritrea ports for food deliveries. These agencies, along with many nations, also argued that if Ethiopia had not engaged in a war with its neighbor, it could afford to purchase more food imports to feed its starving people and would not need the full 836,800 tons of food aid it had requested.

So far, estimates of famine-related dead in Ethiopia range from the hundreds to the low thousands, chiefly among nomadic herders. No one knows what the final body count will be. Even though the famine was caused by a natural disaster it was intensified by wide spread poverty and war. Emergency aid is flooding into Ethiopia from all over the world; it may not be enough to stop this cycle of death. Action must be taken to prevent famine before it happens. Ethiopia’s foreign debt amounts to more than $10,000 million, more than ten times the value of its exports. Perhaps it’s time to forgive this debt and give Ethiopia the economic boost it so desperately needs to carry itself through times of severe drought.

How you can help: http://www.savethechildren.org/emergencies/africa/east_africa.asp