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The Ethiopian government has asked the international community for emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.
The request came at a meeting of donors to discuss the impact of a prolonged drought affecting parts of East Africa. Aid agency Oxfam has called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in the country. In a report marking 25 years since the famine that killed around one million Ethiopians, Oxfam said that imported food aid saves lives in the short term but did little to help communities withstand the next shock. BBC correspondent Mike Wooldridge witnessed Ethiopia’s famine in the 80s. Now he’s back, Marco Werman talks with him.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. Exactly 25 years ago, famine gripped Ethiopia. Few could forget the images of emaciated children, their bellies bloated, and their parents starving and desperate. In the decades that followed, the nation on the horn of Africa seemed to put that crisis behind it. But now, a quarter of a century later, Ethiopia may be slipping back into a food emergency. Today, the Ethiopian government announced it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people. The crisis stems from a prolonged drought that’s afflicting the region. BBC correspondent Mike Wooldridge witnessed Ethiopia’s famine in the mid- ’80s. Now he’s back. And Mike, you are aware it all started 25 years ago right now.
MIKE WOOLDRIDGE: I am indeed. I’m in the town of Mekele up in the highlands of northern Ethiopia which, along with Quorem, was really the epicenter of that famine and some of the most iconic images and sounds of that famine 25 years ago, came from here.
WERMAN: Well, we’ll talk in a moment about what’s changed in Mekele and Ethiopia and the current famine that’s unfolding there, but first you mentioned sounds that you heard 25 years ago. This is actually sound you gathered 25 years ago to the day.
WOOLDRIDGE: It’s too late to save the lives of many of the people around me here in a corrugated iron shelter on the outskirts of Mekele. A middle aged man who’s just died in front of me. His grieving daughter at his side has now lost most of her family in this famine. A few minutes ago, we came across a small bundle in another corner of the shelter which contained the body of a boy of four or five. He was one of six children whose mother died last week. Two more children died here this morning. Here at a Red Cross feeding center for the most severely malnourished children, Nurse Clare Birchinger says it’s heartbreaking to have to send so many needy children away.
CLARE BIRCHINGER: For the 500 we take, there’s thousands we can’t take and that’s terrible, really terrible.
WERMAN: Mike Wooldridge, that was such a dire time. You’re back there in Mekele now. How have things changed? I mean, the civil war is over, but how much has life really changed there?
WOOLDRIDGE: Well, physically, life has changed enormously. Here in particular, this really was just two or three parallel main streets when I was here with just dusty side streets, but today ,this is a bustling town, a lot of new buildings here. It’s seen a lot of development. But that famine of 1984, `985 is of course deeply embedded in the memories, particularly of people here, and particularly of people in Quorem because they saw so much suffering, they saw so much death. But alongside that, I’ve had people saying to me these past few days, “We don’t want these two places to be remembered only as places of suffering and death. We also want them to be remembered as places where lives were saved,” because of course, eventually, an unprecedented aid operation got under way and at least bringing together air forces from western countries and from the Soviet bloc of the time to work together, because Ethiopia was very much caught up in a kind of proxy part of the Cold War. An extraordinary aid operation that did succeed in saving many lives. So all of that really feeds in to the psyche of people, and particularly in this highland part of Ethiopia today.
WERMAN: And yet the Ethiopian government today says it needs emergency food aid for over 6 million people. The World Food Program says $285 million for relief food is needed for the next six months. What or who is to blame for the current crisis?
WOOLDRIDGE: I think climate change, if you want to call it that, is most certainly one of the factors, but it’s not the only one. In a way, the factors that were there right back in 1984 and in the previous famine in 1974, are still at play. The farming landscape here has been very degraded, high populations. And that population has now doubled in Ethiopia. It’s at least 75 million people here now, doubled since 1984, trying to farm the land. So you’ve got that, you’ve got the climate change, you’ve got the environmental factors and some would say you’ve got political factors too, to do with the government’s land policies and so on, which don’t necessarily give farmers the incentives that they might have to grow, though the government denies that.
WERMAN: I was in Addis Ababa in 2005, 20 years on from Live Aid, the big concert organized by Sir Bob Geldof as a response to the TV pictures that you and Michael Burke brought back. And the conclusion of a lot of the people I spoke with was that the government was simply holding out for more debt relief, and just not focused on these rural areas where a lot of these crises occur. The humanitarian group, Oxfam, is today calling for a new approach for tackling the risk of disaster in Ethiopia. Are they referring, do you think, to some of these considerations in the capital?
WOOLDRIDGE: They may well be, but in a way, Oxfam are pointing to what the government would say that it is signed up to itself. It would say that its strategy now is very much about reducing the chronic vulnerability of so many people in the rural areas. Now others might say that that could have progressed much further with different kinds of government policies. All that’s arguable, but certainly, just about everybody here does talk the language of reducing vulnerability. Oxfam today is calling it “disaster risk management,” but Oxfam have also got a message for the donors and actually particularly for the United States, because much of the US aid here is still in the form of food aid brought from the United States. And Oxfam is saying that while, particularly at the moment, food aid is necessary and save lives, the concentration should not be so much on that. There should be a shift, so that much more in the way of resources, donor resources, private investment too no doubt, is put into helping communities, these rural communities, so hard pressed so often, withstand these what will be probably ever more frequent shocks because of climate change.
WERMAN: The BBC’s Mike Wooldridge in the Ethiopian town of Mekele. Thank you very much indeed.
WOOLDRIDGE: And Marco, thank you very much too.
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