Ethiopia appeals for international aid 25 years on * * By Tom Pettifor 23/10/2009

Famine (pic: Getty)

It's been a quarter of a century since the Ethiopian famine which shocked the world - and history could be about to repeat itself.

The government of Ethiopia, a country in the grip of a five-year drought, yesterday asked the international community for emergency aid to feed 6.2 million.

The request came at a meeting of donors to discuss the impact of the drought, affecting parts of East Africa.

The UN's World Food Programme said £173million will be needed in the next six months and some aid officials say the numbers of hungry could rise.

But an Oxfam report to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1984 famine - Band Aids and Beyond - warns that drought will be the norm there for the next 25 years.

And it called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in the country.

HUNGER

Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director who has just returned from Ethiopia, said: "Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution.

"If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores and wells to harvest rains then they can survive."

Oxfam said lessons still had to be learned from the 1984 crisis - which led to Sir Bob Geldof and Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? fundraising single followed by Live Aid in 1985.

It bemoaned that vital long-term strategies receive less than 1% of international aid, with too much emphasis on imported food.

Of the $3.2billion of US aid to Ethiopia since 1991, 94% is food delivered there rather than locally grown.

The report said: "Sending food aid does save lives, (but) the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions." Ms Lawrence added: "We cannot make the rains come, but there is much more that we can do to break the cycle of drought-driven disaster in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

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"Food aid offers temporary relief and has kept people alive but does not tackle underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable."

Un humanitarian co-ordinator Fidelle Sarassaro yesterday urged the Ethiopian government to ensure free access for aid workers to the war-torn Somali region. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi demanded compensation for the continent and claimed that European carbon emissions caused the 1984 disaster.

However, Thea Hilhorst, Professor in Humanitarian Aid at Waheningen University in Holland, said the Ethiopian government must take its share of the blame.

She said: "There's no single cause. One issue is centralised government. All markets are government-controlled and tightly regulated. Many are monopolies and favours go to party members.

"There's a lack of investment in land, partly caused by people not having an incentive to spend money on land that doesn't belong to them."

Bbc Africa's Martin Plaut added: "It is also in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land which belongs to the state and cannot be sold.

UNREST

"So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked they could not provide for the families that work them - even with normal rainfall.

"At present only 17% of Ethiopia's 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause."

However, some have learnt from the 1984 drought - by turning to modern farming.

Tayto Mesfin, 55, standing by an expansive wheat farm 800k north of Addis Ababa, recalled: "It was horrible - there was nothing I could do to save dying neighbours. There is nothing worse than Ethiopia miles food aid, it is never sustainable. With the right methods, shortages can be overcome."

HOW TO HELP

To make a donation for the people of Ethiopia call 0300 200 1999 or go to www.oxfam.org.uk

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