Ethiopia struggles to feed itself 20 yrs after famine?

Reuters Korem (Ethiopia) Dec 14: A ragged band of children emerges ghost-like from mists in Ethiopia’s highlands, thrusting bunches of carrots at a car full of foreigners.

“You! you! you! give me a pen, give me money, give me your car,” they chorus. Heads are shaken but the children, many wrapped in heavy scarves against the chill air, are undeterred.

“Okay, give me a small car,” one of the older boys says, by way of compromise. Crunching on their unsold carrots, one after another sticks out a hand in an appeal for help.

For decades Ethiopia has made the same gesture to foreign donors as it struggles to feed a growing 70 million population, most of whom are peasants, amid poverty and recurrent drought.

The government says Ethiopia should stop leaning on other nations or risk being seen as Africa’s perpetual begging bowl.

“Aid dependency syndrome entered our culture and destroyed the dignity of our people. Some people sold their cattle, their sheep their goats to become eligible for food aid,” said Mr Teamrat Belay, a local official in northern tigray province.

“It was shameful, a taboo. Now, we condemn this way of thinking. Now we have to look to our land, to our labour.”

“Give me” Ethiopians say the “give me” mentality stems from the country’s 1984 famine, in which one million people died, many in or close to Korem’s huge feeding centre.

Shocked by images of emaciated peasants, whose bodies lay wasted away by hunger and malnutrition, the international community sent thousands of tonne of food and raised up to $ 1 billion to feed the dying.

Critics blame the former Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam for ignoring the famine until it spiralled out of control. The crisis was precipitated by widespread soil erosion, consecutive droughts and disastrous land policies that gave little incentive to the individual farmer.

Twenty years on, the legacy is a culture of dependence that the government is determined to end.

“We won’t be looking at handouts anymore. We are determined to change the life of the peasantry,” the Minister of State for Information, Mr Netsannet Asfaw told Reuters.

“Our farming methods have not changed in 3,000 years. You’ll still see oxen ploughing the fields. This has to change.”

And it is changing, slowly. Manmade ponds — ditches reinforced with thick plastic sheeting to collect rainfall — and smallscale irrigation channels have sprouted across Tigray, one of the regions most affected by the 1984 famine.

Farmers have greater access to drought resistant and higher yielding seeds in a bid to be able to feed themselves.

Where once sorghum, maize and barley grew, some fields are now green with plump cabbages, potatoes, garlic and tomatoes as farmers try their hand at cultivating vegetables.

Despite these small improvements, aid agencies like oxfam and world food programme say up to five million Ethiopians are chronically unable to feed themselves.

Many in the donor community say the government could do more to reform a land policy seen as a root cause of its food woes.

“Oxfam’s position is that men and women should have long-term land tenureship so they can invest in that land and be able to use it to access credit for investment,” the Oxfam country director for Ethiopia, Mr Mandy Woodhouse told Reuters.

Farmers lease land from the government but cannot buy their small plots. Critics say lack of ownership sows the seeds of insecurity and discourages farmers from investing long-term.

The government disagrees. “If the land is sold in Ethiopia, we know the rich ones will grab it and we’ll be back in square one, living as serfs,” said Mr Netsannet, the Information Minister.

In the past, the government has grappled with its food problem by forcibly resettling ethiopians from drought-prone highlands to more fertile lowlands.

Once there, many found they did not have the right tools or knowledge to grow the kinds of crops suited to that area.

Ethiopia is again experimenting with resettlement, but on a voluntary basis this time, with a three-year plan to relocate 2.2 million people. Only time will tell if that effort can succeed where others have failed.

But even if it proves a success, it will have come too late for 60-year-old farmer, Mr Alamayoh Akeraw, who by Ethiopian standards is probably nearing the end of his life.

Standing barefoot in his field of maize, where Korem’s mountains descend into plains, Mr Alamayoh’s eyes are rheumy and his goatee silvery with age as he remembers how the famine of 1984 changed his life forever.