NAIROBI: A group of farmers in western Ethiopia destroy the homesteads of a clan reputed to have the power to bring rain, angry at the clan’s failure to end a drought that has shrivelled their crops and killed their cattle.
Photographs of painfully thin cattle and bleached animal skeletons in Ethiopia’s remote northeastern Afar region are published on the UN World Food Programme’s website to accompany an urgent appeal for food aid.
Both Ethiopia and its neighbour Eritrea are again in the grip of a drought which has raised the number of people dependent on food aid to six million from four million in Ethiopia alone.
While the images are familiar, the story is different. This time the two Horn of Africa countries are having to compete for the attention of donors and the media with southern Africa, where a hunger crisis is ravaging six countries and threatens up to 13 million people.
“It is unfortunate to have two crises on the continent at the same time,” World Vision’s sub-regional director for East Africa, Mulugeta Abebe, said in Nairobi on Wednesday.
“Of course we are concerned that there will be competition, but I am hoping the donors will treat both regions equally well.”
Nairobi-based WFP spokeswoman Laura Melo said that while the media had given extensive coverage to the southern African food shortages, the crisis in the Horn of Africa had not been well documented, partly because it was still unfolding.
Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission called on Tuesday for the urgent delivery of more than 100,000 tons of food and for $12 million in non-food assistance, including medicines and veterinary products for livestock.
RAINS FAIL: The drought is blamed on exceptionally dry weather resulting from the partial failure of the “Belg” rains (February to May) and a late start to the main “Meher” rains (June to September).
“We are getting more reports of food shortages and livestock deaths through the country,” said Wagdi Othman, a WFP spokesman in Addis Ababa.
For farmers in the Ambo district of western Ethiopia, any help will be too late — they have already lost everything.
In mid-August police arrested 22 farmers in the district who had attacked the homes of relatives of a deceased “rain man”, accusing them of failing to help them.
Othman said the WFP’s main concern was that the Meher rains would finish too early, drastically reducing the main harvest.
The WFP operation in Ethiopia has received 100,000 tons of food so far, including a US government donation in August of 45,000 tons.
Anne Bousquet, the Catholic Relief Services representative in Ethiopia, said the need in the Horn of Africa was huge “but given what is happening in southern Africa, people are not watching this”.
In neighbouring Eritrea, whose peace deal with Ethiopia two years ago ended a border war that killed 70,000 soldiers on both sides, the government says the situation is also critical and has appealed for 400,000 tons of food to avert an impending humanitarian crisis.
Eritrea faces a “major catastrophe”, the Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission said. “Already, over one million victims of drought and war are undergoing critical shortages of food.”
Worse, this year’s cereal harvest is forecast at only 70,000 tons, 84 per cent below the original target of 452,000 tons, it added.—Reuters