Africa, Development & Aid, Food and Agriculture, Headlines, Human Rights, Poverty & SDGs

ETHIOPIA: Choosing Among One's Own Amid Food Crisis

Nicholas Benequista

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 25 2008 (IPS) - The global food crisis has forced families to make grievous choices. When Mulu Baboche travelled from the Ethiopian capital to visit her home town in the drought-stricken southern countryside, she found her brother weakened, his animals emaciated and his nine children wilting from hunger.

Mulu calculated that she could afford to care for one more child back in Addis Ababa, but which to choose.

"They were all so skinny; they were all the same," Mulu said, seated in her living room.

She chose the youngest, not necessarily the sickest, but her favourite. With a drought and a scarcity of food from the global food crisis leaving millions destitute and even starving, Ethiopia is faced with similar dilemma.

And like Mulu, the country may be showing its own form of favouritism by providing cheap food to urban residents – possibly at the peril of farmers and livestock herders suffering from drought in the country's hinterlands.

Local government offices across the capital and other cities this month began selling food at prices nearly 40 percent below cost, from a first shipment of a total 150,000 tons of wheat, enough food to fill at least five ships.

Including transport, the country paid about $80 million for the grain, according to figures provided by Gebere Egziabher, one of the directors of the Ethiopian Grain Trading Enterprise. The step had been announced months earlier by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as a countermeasure to a doubling of food prices over the last year.

Serious shortfall

But meanwhile, the country has less than half of what it needs for relief efforts in the countryside and is blaming donors for the shortfall. According to some estimates, more than 13 million Ethiopians will need some kind of emergency assistance this year to cope with a combination of drought and rising food prices. Ethiopia asked donors for an extra $300 million in emergency relief in June, and will likely increase its appeal this week.

"It is the humanitarian community's obligation to see that the humanitarian needs are fulfilled," said Simon Mechale, who heads the country's disaster relief agency. "The humanitarian community has not been able to fully support what was jointly established."

Donor governments, however, may balk at the latest appeal as they grow increasingly dismayed with the urban feeding program, which they say has imperilled relief efforts in the countryside. Over the last 18 months, the Ethiopian government has borrowed 260,000 tons of grain from the grain reserve, established as a food bank for desperate times, to support the subsidized food distribution in urban areas. Since the government has not paid back a single ton, the grain reserve is now all but empty.

"It was a very short-sighted strategy because they did not have the reserves to respond," said Suzanne Poland, Head of U.S. AID's Office for Assets and Livelihood Transitions.

Ethiopia and partner organizations like the World Food Program have had to prioritize the use of limited supplies, cutting down rations by a third and only providing food distribution in the worst-affected areas. With millions of destitute families in the countryside receiving no assistance at all, their children are quickly falling into acute malnutrition. Therapeutic feeding centres set up to assist the most desperate cases are in some cases overrun with mothers and their children.

Yet, Ethiopia must also respond to the threat the global food crisis poses to its own political stability. Rising food prices have already led to protests and riots in countries like Mexico and Cameroon; in Haiti, the discontent led to the resignation of the prime minister. In Ethiopia, nothing of that nature has occurred, and policies seem determined to prevent it, including the use the strategic grain reserve.

Since the U.S. and other donors pay back their loans to the grain reserve with direct food aid, bags of U.S. wheat – wheat labelled "not for sale," wheat originally intended as charity "from the American people" – are now being sold along with the wheat the Ethiopian government spent millions to import.

At a press conference earlier this month in Addis Ababa, Ethiopian State Minister for Agriculture Abera Deresa, reiterated the government position that the urban poor are among the most vulnerable. But defending the urban food program on these grounds has become more dubious after the government raised the price of the subsidized grain and allowed anyone to buy.

Formerly, only families certified as poor could buy the subsidized grain at 90 birr ($9.47) for 50 kilos. Now 50 kilos cost 125 birr, pricing out people like Mulu who once depended on it. Instead, traders, bakers and middle-class mothers are now queued up to buy the wheat.

Mulu says she may send her niece back to the countryside as early as next week because of the rising price of the subsidized wheat.

"Life is terrible there, but I have no choice," she said.

Returning from a church ceremony that marked the end of 15 days of fasting, Mulu and her family still had not eaten a meal. She was saving the last of her bread for later in the evening, and unsure of how she would feed her family the next day.

"The coming days are very dark," she said.