October 10, 2002	Thursday	Sha’aban 3, 1423

NAIROBI: Experts warn that some 15 million people in the Horn of Africa are threatened with hunger because of drought.

This food crisis is even more serious than that in southern Africa because Ethiopians and Eritreans are much poorer, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS), an affiliate of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

By next March, 14 million Ethiopians will be in need of food aid because of the failure of the rains. This is the same number of people in need as in the six southern African countries currently facing food shortages.

While the food crisis in southern Africa has attracted a lot of attention in recent months, Ethiopia suffers from donor fatigue. And as the world focuses on the possibility of war with Iraq, Ethiopia’s problems are being largely forgotten.

“It is increasingly hard to stimulate a donor interest in emergency response in Ethiopia,” admits Nick Maunder of FEWS.

A clear illustration of this is the row which has broken out between the European Union (EU) and seven leading aid agencies who have accused the EU of failing to respond adequately to Ethiopia’s needs by “playing with numbers”, said the UN news agency, IRIN.

“We are still waiting for a substantial donation from the European Union to the appeals this year. We call on the EU to make a substantial, real and new pledge to the needs of Ethiopia,” complained Save the Children-UK, Pathfinder Ethiopia, Save the Children-US, Ethiopia, Oxfam-GB, Christian Aid, Action Aid, and Save the Children-Norway in a jointly signed statement, according to IRIN.

Maunder agrees that the world should pay more attention to Ethiopia, pointing out that people in the Horn are much more vulnerable than those in southern Africa.

“I think what it is really important to bare in mind is just how poor people are in Ethiopia,” he urges.

“The harvest loss itself might not sound particularly great, particularly when you compare it to what is happening in southern Africa at the moment. But when you compare that to the really limited ability people have to cope with these shocks and to compensate it is a very worrying situation,” Maunder points out.

Ethiopia does not have the asset base that southern Africa does to meet the consumption gap. Nor is there a vibrant private sector, which can step in and buy supplies during such emergencies.

“In southern Africa, they have a very strong private sector which can import to compensate for the gap. In Ethiopia, the private sector is almost non existent,” Maunder explains.

“Traditionally, it imports almost 10,000 metric tons and everything else comes from food aid. So if the donors don’t step in, you’ve got a quite worrying situation,” he warns.

Ethiopia’s problems this year are the result of poor rainfall, particularly in the eastern highlands. Crop production is expected to be 20 per cent down on last year.

It is now the harvest season, so most people will manage to harvest something to see them through the next few months. The crunch period, according to the country’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee, will be what that food runs out in March to June 2003.

Even though it is harvest season, some seven million people are still short of food. This will fall to four million by December, then rise to 14 million by March.

Neighbouring Eritrea is facing a crisis of similar proportions. The World Food Programme (WFP) warns that one third of Eritrea’s population, some one million people, will require food aid in 2003.

“The cereal harvest will cover only about 15 per cent of Eritrea’s food requirement instead of the average 40-50 per cent,” WFP and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recently warned in the joint report.

The agencies say emergency food aid will be required at least until the harvest at the end of next year, “in order to prevent loss of human life, destitution, liquidation of minimal productive assets and distress migration”.

One reason donors have developed a certain immunity to appeals for food aid from the Horn of Africa is because the two countries have a long term problem feeding themselves. Even in good years, food production in Eritrea is insufficient to meet demand, and the country relies heavily on food imports, including aid.

“The long term future is pretty bleak,” admits Maunder, pointing to the lack of resources, combined with a fairly high population density.

Assets have also been run down over the years with every food crisis.

“People have had to survive by selling off productive assets. You can only keep doing that for so long. At some point we have got to pay the price,” Maunder says.

Donor response to the last drought in 1999/2000 was particularly bad because of the border war going on between Ethiopia and Eritrea at the time.

The two Horn of Africa neighbours have not yet recovered from that two year war, which ended in 2000. Large numbers of people are still displaced and landmines have made some farmland unusable. Thousands of soldiers are waiting to be demobilised, leaving women to cope with agricultural duties alone.

Even the aid agencies admit the danger of Ethiopia and Eritrea sliding into a cycle of donor dependency.

“There is a risk of people developing an over-reliance on food aid with the expectation that this assistance will be provided on a regular basis,” say WFP and FAO.

“This is proving destructive to some traditional coping strategies, and creating a vicious cycle that can lead to dependency. Therefore, it is critical that emergency food aid be provided only to those who cannot survive or will become destitute without it,” the agencies urge.

While aware of this problem, Maunder does not see many alternatives on the horizon.

“It’s very hard to see Ethiopia reversing the trend and moving out of its current situation. While people recognise that we cannot continue with this cycle of recurrent food aid, there is a real paucity of ideas on what the long terms solutions actually are,” he says.

“The level of funding that would be required to make a meaningful difference is pretty huge,” he adds.

However, from a humanitarian perspective, he urges donors not to neglect the Horn of Africa’s needs in favour of southern Africa.

“I think crises have a tendency to grab the headlines. What we actually need to do is look at these different crises in a truly comparably away and base our response on that,” Maunder says.

“I think more resources need to come back to the Horn at this point,” he urges.

The United Nations most senior humanitarian official, Kenzo Oshima, is currently visiting the two Horn of Africa neighbours to assess the situation and make recommendations.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.