BADOSA BATALA (Ethiopia): Abdulkadir Ahmed is only 11 years old, but he knows how badly his country has been hit by drought. He hears it at school — from his belly.

“My stomach makes noise,” says the Grade 2 student in the village of Badosa Batala, 130 kilometres southeast of the capital Addis Ababa. “I am not paying attention to my teacher. We all spend the day thinking about our stomachs.”

More than 11 million Ethiopians are doing the same. That’s how many people will need food aid in the coming year, according to a joint appeal this month from the United Nations, the Ethiopian government and aid agencies. This food crisis threatens to be much worse than the 1984-85 famine that prompted the Live Aid musical fundraising effort.

Heavy annual rains that should have fallen from July to October proved almost non-existent this year, even parching villages like Badosa Batala in the Arsi region, which normally produces a surplus of food. At a time of year when grain stores should be full from recent harvests, villagers are already dependent on food aid, with no prospect of rain until at least March.

But the drought is merely a trigger for the hunger crisis, according to development experts. Rains have regularly failed in Ethiopia throughout history, but people have become less able to cope in recent years because of growing poverty.

“It’s not just the weather,” says Sam Vander Ende, who runs the Ethiopia office of the non-governmental Canadian Foodgrains Bank. “There’s been a gradual impoverishment of the population over time and their ability to withstand shocks has been diminished.”

“The underlying cause of this crisis is the current level of poverty,” adds Kifle Lemma, humanitarian programme coordinator for the British charity Oxfam. He says foreign aid should do more than just prevent starvation — it must help the country develop.

Ethiopia’s per capita annual income is estimated at about $110, making it as poor as war-ravaged countries like Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

More than 85 per cent of Ethiopians depend on irrigation that is no more there. The population has doubled in 25 years but the productivity of the land has not kept pace.

It all means that nearly 5 million Ethiopians rely on food aid every year, even when harvests are good.

“We are trying to help farmers deal with these problems,” says Wagdi Othman, spokesman for the UN World Food Programme in Addis Ababa. “People have gone so deep into destitution, it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to recover from a drought.”

The drought has not yet brought Ethiopia to a stage of famine, but the experts are seeing what they call “pre-famine conditions” — such as rising malnutrition rates among children and increased migration.

People are starting to eat wild food like cactus leaves and potentially toxic berries. Women are illegally chopping trees to sell as charcoal. Prices for grain have shot up, while prices for livestock have collapsed. Yet people are selling their animals just to earn some cash, mortgaging their futures to fill their bellies in the short term.

Farmer Gobe Toure is trying to resist the pull to sell his two cattle. “They are the only property I have,” says Toure as he stands beside a nearly empty watering hole in the village of Dedecha Guracha. “It’s not good to sell them, otherwise what will I have next year?”

However, he admits his cattle are in danger of dying from the drought: “They are too skinny and they can’t move long distances.”

“Every time one of these droughts hits, more and more people fall into destitution,” says an official with the US Agency for International Development. She says the test of the coming months will be whether aid gets to hungry people before they sell everything they own just to survive.—dpa