Famine, war and excuses of the foolish govts

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It is a profoundly stupid and pointless war, over chunks of rocky land that are of no real importance to either Ethiopia or Eritrea, and at least 50,000 people have already died in the fighting. But that is still no excuse for letting hundreds of thousands of people starve.

People are using the border war as an excuse, though. For example, Carolyn McAskie, the United Nations deputy coordinator for emergency relief, blames three factors for the looming famine in the Horn of Africa.

One is poor rains, she concedes, but the other two are implicitly the fault of the foolish local governments: refugee flows, and the diversion for resources to fight the two-year-old war.

Poul Nielsen, Development Commissioner for the European Union (which has sent an "emergency" team to assess the situation in the Horn a mere five months after the Ethiopian government issued its first famine warning), sang a similar refrain.

He called on Ethiopia and Eritrea to improve relations in order to facilitate the import of 800,000 metric tons of emergency food through Eritrea's ports to the famine-hit areas of land-locked Ethiopia, as if all the starving would be eating hearty now if not for that stupid African war.

The stupid African war has practically nothing to do with it. "All these are lame excuses to disguise the incompetence and lack of political will of the Western world," writes Sir Bob Geldof, formerly of the band Boomtown Rats and the 1985 famine relief spectacular Band Aid, now a respected expert on famine aid.

"So far a measly 5,000 tons (of food) are all that has arrived in a country where the television cameras are now showing rows of new victims in yet another ghastly parade of children with swollen bellies and stick limbs."

Ethiopia's Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin angrily claimed last week at the Africa-Europe summit in Cairo that the international community only responds to famine in Africa "when people come to see the skeletons on the screen," but it's worse than that.

They react even more slowly if the plight of the starving can plausibly be blamed on their own governments. Compassion fatigue, Geldof calls it, and he is quite right.

There is a war, but there has been no fighting along the Ethiopian-Eritrean frontier in months, and the "international community" could certainly extract pledges from both sides to keep it that way if it became absolutely essential to move food in through Eritrean ports.

More to the point, only 5,000 tons of food (out of 450,000 tons pledged, and an estimated 800,000 tons needed) have actually arrived so far in the neutral port of Djibouti, just down the Red Sea coast from Eritrea.

Far greater quantities of food than have any prospect of reaching the Horn in the near future can be unloaded through Djibouti.

Hardly any of the refugees from the war have fled as far as Ethiopia's eastern province of Ogaden, the current heart of the famine. All these attempts to blame both the famine and the tardiness of the Western aid effort on the war are pure cover-up.

What has caused the famine, quite simply, is that the rains have failed in much of Ethiopia for the third year in a row.

Even the United States would be importing huge amounts of food by now if there had been such a drought over its main grain- growing areas.

The war is idiotic, but it has almost nothing to do with the problem. Nor has the Ethiopian government been negligent in taking precautions against famine.

In the last great Ethiopian famine in 1984-1985, when almost a million of the country's citizens starved to death, the regime in Addis Ababa bore a great deal of the blame.

The blood-stained Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was practically confiscating the crops of farmers at government-set low prices, so even in areas where there was rain, farmers had no incentive to grow more than they needed to feed themselves.

They therefore produced no surplus to share with the drought- struck areas, and so people died.

The more or less democratic government led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (which faces an election next month) has allowed farmers to sell on the open market, and food production in good years has soared.

In 1977, for the first time in history, Ethiopia had a net food surplus to export. Ethiopia also set up an Emergency Food Security Reserve that buys up grain in good years and stores it for bad.

The bad years started in 1998, when the rains failed over large parts of the country, and both then and in 1999 Ethiopia covered the shortfall in food production out of its own stocks.

By last year they were running short, but Ethiopia has gone ahead and distributed what was left on the basis of promises from Western donors that they would replenish the stocks in time.

So now the country's own grain reserve has been run down from 400,000 tons to only 30,000 tons -- only two weeks' supply -- while only 5,000 tons have arrived from abroad.

That is why people are starting to starve in large numbers in Ethiopia.

"It is grossly irresponsible, to say the least," said Burhane Gizaw, deputy commissioner of the government's Disaster Prevention Planning Committee.

"To promise help and then not deliver it is worse than never promising anything at all." And to shift the blame for the delays onto the victims is truly contemptible.

It is not too late to save the lives of most of those who are threatened with starvation in Ethiopia (and in adjacent parts of Somalia and Kenya). But it has got very late indeed, and there is no time for more excuses.