'Death
Awaits': Africa Faces Worst Drought in Half a Century
By
Bartholomäus Grill
May
11, 2016 – 04:56 PM
The
worst drought in half a century has stricken large parts of Africa --
a consequence of El Niño and high population growth. More than 50
million people are threatened by hunger and few countries have been
hit as hard as Ethiopia.
Herdsman Ighale
Utban used to be a relatively prosperous man. Three years ago, he
owned around a hundred goats. Now, though, all but five of them have
died of thirst at a dried-up watering hole, victims of the worst
drought seen in Ethiopia and large parts of Africa in a half-century.
Utban, a wiry man of
36 years, belongs to a nomadic people known as the Afar, who spend
their lives wandering through the eponymously named state in
northeastern Ethiopia. "This is the worst time I've experienced
in my life," he says. On some days, he doesn't know how to
provide for himself and his seven-member family.
"We can no
longer wander," Utban says, "because death awaits out
there." For now, he'll have to remain in Lii, a scattered little
settlement in which several families have erected their makeshift
huts. Lii means "scorching hot earth."
'First the Livestock
Die, Then the People'
Since time
immemorial, shepherds have wandered with their animals through the
endless expanses of the Danakil desert. They live primarily off of
meat and milk, and it was always a meagre existence. But with the
current drought, which has lasted for over a year, their very
existence is threatened. "First the livestock die, then the
people," Utban says.
The American relief
organization USAID estimates that in Afar alone, over a half million
cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and camels have perished. Reservoirs
are empty, pastures dried up, feed reserves nearly exhausted. With no
rain, grass no longer grows. Many nomads are selling their emaciated
livestock, but oversupply has led to a 50 percent decline in prices.
Currently, millions
of African farmers and herders are suffering similar fates to
Utban's. The United Nations estimates that more than 50 million
people in Africa are acutely threatened by famine. After years of
hope for increased growth and prosperity, the people are once again
suffering from poverty and malnutrition.
State of Emergency
The governments of
Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland have already
declared states of emergency, and massive crop losses have caused
food prices to explode in South Africa. Particularly hard stricken
are the countries in the southern part of the continent as well as
around the Horn of Africa, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and especially
Ethiopia.
Meteorologists
believe the natural disaster is linked to a climate phenomenon that
returns once every two to seven years known as El Niño, or the
Christ child, a disruption of the normal sea and air currents that
wreaks havoc on global weather patterns. The El Niño experienced in
2015-2016 has been particularly strong.
Mohamed Nasir is the
clan elder in the Lii nomad settlement. He says he's never heard of
El Niño before. "The lack of water is our main problem --
that's why we're fighting for our lives." Nasir doesn't have any
explanation for why the weather has gone crazy. For why drops of rain
no longer fall from the ice-gray skies here in the mountains, while
only a three days' walk away, the plains are flooded. For why his
home region has been plagued by periodic droughts for more than eight
years now. "Perhaps it's God's will," he says.
Nasir has just
finished praying for rain, bending over in the dust according to
Muslim ritual, with grains of sand still stuck to his forehead. He's
61 years old, but the worry lines in his face make him look a lot
older. He sits in the shadows of a camel thorn tree, looking east. A
hot wind blows from the Red Sea out over the karstic, grayish-brown
countryside. Over the horizon, the empty promise of a few
cirrostratus clouds can be seen. He's been waiting for rain for a
year now.
An Image at Odds
with Emerging Ethiopia
This year's crisis
is worse than the one that befell the area in 1985, Nasir says. Back
then, the most catastrophic year in Ethiopian history, around a
million people died of famine.
Nasir says there
have already been deaths this year in his clan's region. He points to
the mountainside behind and says, "Nine children are buried
there." Other herders also speak of the first starvation victims
in Afar, but it isn't possible to confirm the reports.
The government in
Addis Ababa denies the deaths. It wants to overcome Ethiopia's image
as a country eternally beset by famine and instead present itself as
an emerging nation. The Ethiopian economy, after all, is among the
fastest growing in the world, with annual growth rates as high as 10
percent in recent years.
Ethiopia, one of the
world's poorest countries, has transformed itself into a successful
development dictatorship based on the Chinese model. It wants to
achieve middle-income country status by 2025 and establish itself
firmly as an emerging nation. Pictures of starving children with
large, sorrowful eyes do not fit with that image.
The country's boom
is visible in the capital city of Addis Ababa, which is currently
undergoing an incredibly fast process of modernization. High rises
and giant new districts are sprouting up everywhere, new motorways
criss-cross the capital and a light-rail system has even been built
-- the first anywhere south of the Sahara. Numerous new industrial
enterprises are located at the city's outskirts, where they produce
textiles and leather goods for the global market.
Covering Up the
Scale of the Disaster
For a long time, the
government insisted that the country could handle the situation on
its own. Indeed, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn first requested
assistance from the international community in March. But
international aid organizations were also ordered not to speak
publicly about the true scale of the disaster, the liberal magazine
Addis Standard recently reported -- a newspaper that is viewed with
some skepticism by the government.
The authoritarian
regime doesn't tolerate criticism: Members of the opposition are
persecuted and unruly journalists imprisoned. Nor are oppositional
voices to be heard in parliament, where the governing Ethiopian
People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) holds 100 percent of
the seats. The party liberated Ethiopia in 1991 from the socialist
terror rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam, but itself likewise acts with a
heavy hand.
The country's
Western allies ignore the continuing human rights violations because
Ethiopia, a bastion of Christianity, is an important military partner
in the battle against Islamist terror on the Horn of Africa.
In praising itself,
the government often points to the lessons learned from the 1984-85
famine. In response, Ethiopia set up a disaster early warning system
and created emergency grain reserves. The country built dams,
irrigation systems and roads. Around 7 million small farmers now
receive crisis aid through a state safety net.
Esubalew Meberate is
proud of these achievements. As the head of an administrative
district with 257,000 residents, he's responsible for 37
municipalities, 22 of which have been affected by the drought. He
receives visitors in his office in the city of Gohala, high in the
mountains in the state of Amhara. Meberate wears a stylish black
leather jacket and a white casual shirt. He's a typical
representative of the ruling class: young, power conscious and a tad
arrogant. He admits that ensuring water supply is the greatest
challenge. The problem is that a dearth of transport routes makes it
impossible for tanker trucks to reach all the villages. Still, he
says, the government is working to address it. "Our economy is
growing despite the drought and our agricultural potential is nowhere
near exhausted."
'We No Longer Have
Enough to Eat'
Yet even as the
elite in the capital city enthuse about economic growth, in the
mountains of Amhara, the Ethiopian heartland, people like farmer
Destay Zegeye are suffering. "We no longer have enough to eat,"
she complains. Last year, she says, the belg, or short rainy season,
failed to materialize. Neither did kiremt, the long rainy season.
Zegeye says she was only able to harvest a hundred kilograms of teff,
the country's most important food grain. She was able to keep two
sacks for her seven-member household -- far too little for survival.
Zegeye, 36, wears a
tattered, patchwork dress with a cross dangling from her neck. She
walks across the field in front of her hut, a half-hectare (1.2
acre), dry and dusty square littered with stones.
She is struggling to
get her family through this period of struggle. Sometimes her husband
earns a few birr as a day laborer for a government employment
creation program focusing on the construction of schools, roads and
storm water tanks. He also recently sold two of their four oxen. The
family also gets rations from the government -- 15 kilograms of
grains per month and household. Somehow they manage to get by, but
for how much longer?
All around the
mountainous country, you find the same bleak image: cracked soil hard
as cement, rocky fields and dried-up creek beds -- no green patches
for as far as the eye can see. In between are impoverished mountain
villages that are constantly growing: Places like Qualisa, for
example. Just 15 years ago, only 1,500 people lived here, but today a
local employee of the German relief organization German Agro Aid
(Welthungerhilfe) estimates that figure to be closer to 12,000. Such
growth is the result of enormous settlement pressure. The once
forested mountainsides have been clear-cut because of the growing
population's need for firewood and construction material.
Ethiopia Needs an
Agricultural Revolution
At the same time,
agricultural production has failed to keep up with the pace of
population growth. Since the massive famine that struck Ethiopia in
1984-85, the country's population has swollen from 41 million to 102
million. One-third of the population is already considered to be
malnourished today: There simply isn't enough to go around in many
parts of the country.
Much of that
situation is attributable to the country's antiquated system of
subsistence farming. Millions of small farmers are incapable of
yielding larger harvests because of their inability to access
investment capital, equipment, fertilizers and high-quality seeds. In
addition, their property belongs to the state, meaning they can
cultivate it, but are unable to use it as collateral on any potential
loans. They thus slave away just as in biblical times, using hoes,
oxen and wooden plows to till low-yield soil.
What Ethiopia needs
is an agricultural revolution, but the government is doing too little
to mechanize agriculture and increase productivity. In fact, it has
done the opposite by clinging to its strategy of industrialization --
one that includes the leasing of giant farmlands to foreign
agricultural companies which then export foodstuffs in grand fashion
from the country at a time when it must import hundreds of thousands
of tons of wheat in order to compensate for the crop losses caused by
the drought.
Will Famine Become
Chronic?
There also appears
to be little concern in political power circles about annual
population growth of 2.5 percent. The attitude seems to be: the more
people it has, the stronger Ethiopia will be. What this overlooks is
that the rapid recent population increase has been eroding successes
in development policy. Agriculture experts warn that if the Ethiopian
population swells to 150 million people by 2035 as some are
predicting, famine could become a chronic problem.
Nor is this problem
limited to Ethiopia. It could also be a harbinger of further food
crises in Africa. "We are simply too many people," says
Ayenew Ferede, 37, the head of a kebele, the smallest administrative
unit in Ethiopia. Seven-thousand people live in his ward, and 2,000
receive government emergency aid. "People are starving because
we have run out of everything -- water, grain reserves, livestock
feed."
Ferede has traveled
for four hours by foot here to the small town of Hamusit in the hunt
for aid. He carries a heavy burden of responsibility. He, too,
reports of famine deaths. "If it doesn't rain soon, we are all
going to leave." But where will they go? "To the next
kebele, to the city, across the sea to you in Europe. Someplace where
there's water and food."
Though it has rained
in recent days in some parts of the country, Ferede has little hope.
"It's too little, too late and the worst is yet to come."
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