|
THE TINY PLOT of land Jambo Bedasso farmed in Ethiopia's Rift Valley produced enough grain
to feed his family of five, but it never made him much money. So when a
vicious drought took hold of his country last year, he had little to fall
back on. "I have only 56 birr [$10] left in this pocket," said
Bedasso, gesturing at the tattered grey pants that hold his life savings.
Like a growing number of farmers, he has been forced to abandon his parched
fields and survive by doing manual labour: smashing boulders into building
blocks and lugging bags of cement -- all carried out under a relentless sun
for pennies a day. As Bedasso rested under the shade of a thorn tree, he
shared his worries about his nine-month-old son, Gana. "He's becoming
thinner and thinner," Bedasso told Maclean's,
his greying beard failing to hide his own hollow cheeks. "We have so
little to eat."
During
the wet season of July to October, almost no rain fell across nearly
one-third of Ethiopia, from the northern border with Eritrea to the southern border with Kenya. Villages, like those around
Bedasso's farm, 125 km southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa, are drowning in dust. The soil
has dried into clumps so hard they look like stones; ankle-deep muddy water
is all that remains in ponds built to conserve runoff. Nearly 90 per cent of
crops have been lost in some areas, and 11 million people (nearly a sixth of Ethiopia's population) will need food aid
this year. Sam Vander Ende of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a Winnipeg-based
aid agency that distributes grain, has lived in Ethiopia for nine years, but says,
"I've never seen anything of the magnitude of what we're confronted with
today."
The
crisis is potentially worse than the 1984-85 famine in which one million
people died. While the length of the current drought has not been as long as
it was in the 1980s, farmers ground down by years of poverty no longer have
the resources to survive even a short dry spell. To prevent widespread
starvation, the UN and donor nations have launched a massive effort to
distribute as much as 1.4 million tonnes of food this year. (Canada has agreed to spend $47 million
to help finance the program.)
Yet
food aid alone won't solve Ethiopia's chronic hunger problem. Nearly
five million Ethiopians
need food relief even in years of good harvests. And Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi has been criticized for doing little to boost food production during
his decade in power, and for having waged a costly war with Ethiopia's northern neighbour Eritrea over a disputed boundary.
"The government emphasizes that it's a poor country," says Vander
Ende. "But they were a poor country that could afford to fight a
war."
The
money used to finance the war could have been spent modernizing the
agricultural sector. The Blue Nile flows through the country, but
less than five per cent of arable land is irrigated and 85 per cent of Ethiopia's population live as subsistence
farmers. "This country could be the breadbasket of Africa," says Don Peden, a Canadian
agricultural researcher based in Ethiopia.
Instead,
people are migrating to towns in search of water, work and aid. Animals are
dying or being sold. "I have one ox and I am going to sell it at the
market," declares Abdirahman Dori, his second-hand, turquoise-coloured
blazer caked with dust. But before he sets out, a local official tells Dori
he'll be lucky to get $80 for his ox -- less than half of what it would have
fetched a year ago. "I would prefer to sell it for 1,000 birr
[$184]," says Dori. "But nobody will give it."
Selling
livestock is no longer an option for Bedasso -- his animals perished in the
drought. His wife, Halima Wayesa, leans against the wall of a mud hut,
holding Gana. Mother and son both have raspy chest coughs, and she shyly
lowers her eyes to her T-shirt, emblazoned with the word Titanic and Leonardo
DiCaprio's fading image. "Since I don't eat much food," she says,
"I don't have much breast milk." Gana, dressed only in a tattered
sweater, cries after a few seconds of futile nursing. He receives a cuddle
and a kiss. But his stomach -- like those of millions of Ethiopians -- remains
painfully empty.
|