Worldwide Relief Effort Works Astounding Changes in Ethiopia : Most Fed and Famine Camps Emptying, but Disaster Still Lurks

A year ago, stretchers were dispatched every morning in this famine camp to collect bodies. Morning after morning, they were brought to the morgue tent, and washed and wrapped in shrouds fashioned from food-aid bags, while relatives sat in the dirt outside and wept.

Last week, the morgue was empty. Scores of stretchers, which had once borne as many as 100 corpses a day, lay on the floor of the morgue, gathering dust. Just outside, fat-cheeked children played and sang, joyfully oblivious to the past.

Transformation Testament

The one-year transformation of Korem from a burgeoning famine camp where doctors felt helpless to a shrinking feeding center where doctors are bored is testament to a worldwide relief operation that in the past year has defanged, if not yet defeated, Ethiopia’s great famine.

A year ago, relief food reached only one out of 10 of the 7.9 million Ethiopians threatened by starvation, according to United Nations figures. Now, after the emergency importation of almost 1 million metric tons of food and the expenditure of about $1.3 billion, the U.N. estimates that nine out of 10 of those people are being fed.

“What we have done is save the lives of most of the 7.9 million who were at risk. Some have died, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, not the millions. It is one of the world’s great success stories,” said Fred C. Fischer, the U.S. coordinator of emergency relief in Ethiopia, speaking of the combined efforts of 35 countries, several U.N. agencies and 47 non-governmental organizations.

At the height of the emergency last March, there were 43 famine camps feeding about 1 million people. The remaining 23 camps now feed fewer than 70,000. Ethiopians walk away from the camps nearly every day.

To someone who passed through Korem last year, the changes wrought in 12 months are astounding.

In the camp’s four hospital sheds, Ethiopians last year slept six or seven to a bed, shivering in rags in the highland cold. In those sheds last week, they slept one or two to a bed, wrapped in thick wool blankets.

The cholera isolation ward where 228 people died in one month last spring is now closed. Flies no longer crawl in the eyes of children too weak to shoo them away.

Last year, the camp’s stick-like children impassively submitted to a weighing procedure in which they were put in a harness and hung from a hook attached to a scale. Last week, many of them refused the harness and grabbed onto the hook as if to do a chin-up. While being weighed, many giggled.

Yet, despite the smiles of the children and the optimism of their parents, who say they are eager to farm again, the Ethiopian famine still presents an imminent threat of mass death.

Like tens of thousands of Ethiopians who have left the famine camps, most of the people leaving Korem last week will not be able to feed themselves for at least a year, relief officials said.

On their farms, many of which are perched on inaccessible ridges in the northern highlands, they will be just as dependent on outside food aid as they were this past year at Korem.

“These people are going to have to live for the next year or so on the grain, oil and skim milk that we take out to them,” said Hugo Slim, administrator for a child-nutrition center at Korem, which is run by the British chapter of Save the Children.

Plentiful rains and a good harvest in much of Africa have ended the food emergency in 16 of the 21 countries affected by drought this year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Such chronically arid nations as Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania are not expected to need outside food in 1986. Good crops have cut relief needs in Sudan, the second worse drought-affected country in Africa, nearly in half for next year.

Of the five countries the FAO says will require food aid next year--Mozambique, Botswana, Angola, Sudan and Ethiopia--it is once again Ethiopia that stands out.

The Ethiopian government announced last month that 5.8 million people will be threatened by starvation in 1986, and that another 1.2 million metric tons of food will be needed to feed them. This is more than the combined food-assistance requirements of all of Africa.

Aid officials say there are two major reasons for Ethiopia’s continued crises, even as most of Africa recovers.

First, the rains this year were spotty and ended too soon in many of the most affected areas.

Second, Ethiopia was so ravaged this year by famine that it could not take full advantage of the rain that did fall. Many farmers were too weak to plant, there were too few oxen to plow, seeds were in short supply, insects and bacterial blight were unusually destructive.

Many of the people still in Korem are refugees from failed attempts last summer to grow food in the surrounding mountains.

Berhane Wolde, 30, spent nearly a year in hospital Block D at Korem, which housed severely malnourished families. Two of his three children, he said, died beside him in a bed he shared with another family.

He said he went home with his wife and remaining child in July and planted the seeds that he had been given at Korem, but the rains ended too soon and they did not grow. The farmer said he is willing to go home again and try to grow another crop, but only if food is distributed near his village.

Fears for 1986

Some of the largest private relief organizations in Ethiopia fear that farmers such as Berhane may starve on their farms in the middle of 1986 unless more than 1 million metric tons of food are pledged soon and begin to move through a food-delivery pipeline that is about five months long.

“What did we save these people for this year, if we let them starve in 1986?” asked Frank Carlin, country director here for Catholic Relief Services, the largest private relief agency in Ethiopia.

Thus far, only the U.S. government has made a firm pledge for 1986. As it did this year, Washington intends to supply one-third of whatever the United Nations determines is the emergency need.

After a year of working with the Ethiopian government, most donors give it high marks for honesty.

“There has been very, very little corruption. The food has gone where it was supposed to go,” said Fischer, the chief official here for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has spent $280 million in the past year while delivering 440,000 tons of food. “Corruption has just not been a problem.”

There have been chronic problems, however, in transporting relief food from Ethiopia’s ports. For most of this year, a shortage of long-haul trucks and frequent breakdowns on the country’s crumbling highways have combined to create a standing backlog of more than 100,000 tons of food at Assab, the main port.

The recent arrival of more than 400 new trucks, including 43 purchased by Band-Aid/Live-Aid that went into service last week, has relief officials here saying the transportation bottleneck is now nearly solved.

There also have been and continue to be rancorous disputes between Western donors, who supplied 97% of the relief aid in the past year, and Ethiopia’s Marxist government, whose major ally is the Soviet Union.

The Ethiopian government has refused to modify an agricultural pricing structure that Western economists say guarantees food shortages in this country of 42 million people.

Ethiopia, which the World Bank this year lists as the poorest country in the world, with a per-capita income of $120 a year, has what economists call a “structural food deficit,” meaning that it is unable to feed itself even in years without drought.

The U.N. Children’s Fund says that on average, in normal years, Ethiopians eat only about three-quarters of the calories they need to be healthy.

Ethiopian farmers, some of whom till the most fertile land in Africa, must sell a large proportion of their surplus crops to the government at prices that do not cover the cost of production.

Agricultural economists here say that most Ethiopian farmers respond to such a system in the only way that makes sense: they produce only as much food as they and their families can eat.

Despite pressure from the World Bank, which offered more than $100 million in concessionary farm loans in return for price reforms, the government here made no major changes in farm policy.

During the last year, however, as the rest of the earth worried about the survival of Ethiopians, the country’s government has been active working on its own survival.

According to Western diplomats and relief officials, the government this year waged a major and successful military offensive against rebels in the north.

While humanitarian aid valued at more than $1 billion poured into the country from the West, the U.S. government estimates that about $1 billion worth of Soviet-supplied arms and ammunition also was shipped here to support the offensive.

“The famine has been competing with a major war,” said James Cheek, the U.S. charge d’affaires here. Food aid from the United States, the largest donor here, has “legitimized good feelings toward the United States,” Cheek said.

However, he added, “the past year’s war has pushed the Ethiopian government deeper into the arms of the Soviet Union than ever.”

Accordingly, relations between the U.S. government and Ethiopia “have not improved a bit,” Cheek said.

Besides the offensive against the rebels in Eritrea and Tigre, for which the government frequently diverted long-haul trucks that it had promised to use in famine relief, the Ethiopian government has been active on two other fronts during the year of the great famine.

The government launched a nationwide “villagization” project that forces farmers to live in clusters of houses rather than on their farms. The program’s announced purpose is to increase the availability of social services for rural people.

Critics of the program, including several development specialists and members of the government’s own Agriculture Ministry, say they fear that the program will disrupt local food production.

The other major initiative is intended to be a permanent solution to chronic famine in the northern highlands.

The resettlement program, which has moved nearly 600,000 people in the past year, takes farmers from the overpopulated and badly eroded northern highlands to more fertile lands in the southwest. Many Western relief specialists say resettlement is a sound idea.

From its beginning last fall, the government said resettlement would be voluntary, and that families would be kept together. According to reports from relief workers in the north, however, the program has not been voluntary in thousands of cases, and many families have been separated.