Relief Poured In, but Help to Avert Another Famine Is Scarce : Aid Dries Up as Ethiopia Drought Ends

Just a year ago, this drought-plagued country was flooded with help: Foreign relief workers clogged the hotels, cargo planes crisscrossed the skies and international aid agencies sent Land Rovers into the remotest regions.

Today, that help is swiftly retreating. Foreign assistance in the coming year is expected to be less than a quarter of the $1.5 billion spent here in 1985. Aid from Western governments has fallen by as much as 90%. And private giving, spawned by the compelling television pictures of famine, has dropped sharply.

The United Nations Office for Emergency Operations is closing this month. Most of the four dozen relief agencies that grew into giants overnight are staying, but with small crews and smaller budgets.

But high-level government officials, relief workers and economic analysts interviewed recently in Ethiopia all made the same forecast: Another famine is inevitable.

The long-term aid Ethiopia needs to help itself has not been forthcoming, they say, and only when the famine alarm sounds, as it did in 1984, will the world come running again with blankets and food.

The famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people and imperiled at least 8 million others is now only a memory in most of Ethiopia. City-size shelters that once housed and fed a million people have closed.

Things have pretty much returned to normal, which is to say that more than 2 million people still face the danger of starvation, average income is 30 cents a day and falling, there is one doctor for every 53,000 people and only one Ethiopian in 10 has access to clean drinking water. Meanwhile, the population, which now stands at 42 million, increases by 100,000 every month.

Still, much of the rugged face of Ethiopia is green again. Plentiful autumn rainfall has been reported in most areas, and for the first time in several years many farmers have fields thick with corn, sorghum and teff, a cereal and staple food.

Insects and uneven rainfall have affected some fields, especially in pockets of Eritrea, Tigre and Wollo provinces, where the drought hit hardest. Yet most analysts believe it will be a good harvest nonetheless, perhaps erasing the 30% decline in agricultural production of 1984. It will be some time, though, before the farmers and herdsmen are able to replenish their stocks.

Still Can’t Feed Itself

The easing of drought does not mean that the country will come anywhere near being able to feed itself. In the best years, Ethiopia falls $200 million short of food and needs outside help.

As the mass feeding program has ended, many foreign aid donors and charitable organizations have gradually switched from relief programs to rehabilitation--but at the same time drastically slashed the amount of money they spend here.

“This poor country receives, when in great need, a lot of general foreign aid--relief aid from the West and armaments from the East,” Gregorio Monasta, resident director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said not long ago. “But nobody invests in this country for development.”

Monasta’s statement is not literally true, but funds for development and rehabilitation are limited.

Ethiopia’s largest benefactor during the drought, the United States, gave $460 million in food and supplies in 1985-86, accounting for one-third of all famine relief. The famine brought an office of the U.S. Agency for International Development back to Ethiopia, seven years after it had packed up and left.

U.S. Help Cut

AID is staying, but the United States has trimmed its assistance for the coming year to $20 million in food aid--and nothing for development. U.S. law prohibits economic development assistance for Ethiopia’s Marxist regime, which receives $500 million a year in military support from the Soviet Union.

The second-largest donor of famine relief, the European Communities, has cut the level of its food assistance in 1987 by two-thirds.

World Vision, one of the private relief agencies operating here, grew from a staff of 80 and a budget of $3.5 million in 1983 to a staff of 2,000 and a budget of $220 million during the two-year famine. Now it has whittled its staff to 150 and its budget to $20 million.

At the U.N. Emergency Operations office, where an international staff of 22 has been cut in half, maps, chalkboards and charts used to coordinate the relief effort are coming down from the walls. When the office closes Dec. 31, the staff will be absorbed into other U.N. agencies. Some will continue to monitor crop and rain reports to alert the world when the signs of drought reappear.

Chronic Condition

Michael J. Priestley, head of the U.N. emergency office, said he was disappointed by the small number of pledges for health care and water supply projects here. He believes that Ethiopia is in a “chronic famine condition,” but he says the donor countries feel “very strongly that the famine emergency is over.”

Berhanu Jembere, chief of Ethiopian government’s relief and rehabilitation commission, said the West, which provided 90% of the famine assistance here, is using this year’s good harvest “as an excuse to terminate their activities.”

“A year’s abundant rainfall cannot actually change the overall situation,” Jembere said.

In 1985, the Ethiopian government went some months before even acknowledging the contributions of Western governments. But the tone has changed among members of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party.

Mersie Ejigu, a Central Committee member and minister in charge of the National Committee for Central Planning, said in an interview: “The response of people in Western countries has been magnificent . . . indeed fantastic. We are extremely grateful. But if we cannot work on rehabilitation in the magnitude that we did with relief, we are going to have another famine.”

Some Development Help

Ethiopia is getting some development help from the West. The World Bank has lent Ethiopia $40 million for reforestation, $60 million for health and nutrition and $60 million for a project giving technical advice and such things as fertilizer to farmers.

The Italian government and two private organizations, Irish Concern and Band Aid, have projects to help people obtain clean drinking water, build roads and become agriculturally self-sufficient in resettlement areas populated by people the government has moved from perennial drought areas.

But Ethiopia faces enormous and expensive problems. Per capita income in Ethiopia is about $110 a year, the lowest in the world, and the population growth rate is 2.9%, one of the highest in the world. Most farmers use methods dating from the 10th Century and often live on tiny hilltop plots made bare by too much cultivation and grazing.

“It would take so much money to get people up to just a subsistence level of farming in this country,” a Western economic analyst said recently, “ . . . and only then can you talk about development.”

Emergencies Attract Money

No matter how much relief workers want to prevent another famine, money for emergency food will always be more available than money for helping farmers do a better job of growing food.

“It’s much easier to get funding for relief than rehabilitation,” said Wendy Bjoerck, the UNICEF emergency rehabilitation director here. UNICEF raised $30 million for its emergency operations here in 1985 and $17 million for 1986. But only $4 million of its appeal for $17 million this year has been raised.

Ken W. Tracey, executive director in Ethiopia of World Vision, a California-based nonprofit group, said: “When a crisis comes up, you get a peak of giving and then fatigue sets in. We use that peak to battle a crisis. The problem is always finding enough money to carry on and keep the crisis from happening again.”

Before the famine, relief assistance for Ethiopia amounted to about $6 a person, compared to the continentwide average of about $20 a person. During the famine it rose to $35 a person. Although it has fallen since then, it remains higher than it was before the drought.

Soviet Ties

Part of the reason the West has been less generous with developmental money for Ethiopia is political. Marxism was ushered into Ethiopia with the revolution of 1974 that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. The long economic and military relationship with the United States ended three years later, when Ethiopia turned to the Soviet Union for arms to fight secessionist forces in Tigre and Eritrea provinces.

As elsewhere in the world, the East Bloc provides millions in military assistance but little food or developmental aid. Of the famine relief effort, the East Bloc contributed a tiny fraction, almost all of it military vehicles for transporting food.

But more than a difference in ideology stands in the way of Ethiopian assistance. Western diplomats here say they see little point in pouring development money into a country whose agricultural policies--low prices for farm goods and an effort to establish collectivized farms--reduce the incentive for farmers and “amount to a recipe for disaster,” as one envoy put it.

An international financial expert in Addis Ababa said: “It isn’t the ideology here that’s the constraint. It’s the dedication to a controlled economy that’s hampering things. If the world at large had confidence that Ethiopia was following a strategy that would prevent famine in the future, then the government would get more aid.”

Heavy Government Spending

The Ethiopian government says it is trying to improve its agricultural policies. It is spending 22% of its budget this year for agriculture, slightly more than it spends on keeping Africa’s largest standing army.

Ethiopia’s attempts to solicit foreign help for its long-term problems have been hindered by recent criticism from Doctors Without Borders, a private French relief group that was expelled from the country last year.

Writing in the October issue of Readers’ Digest, Dr. Rony Brauman, the group’s director, charged that Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam’s regime had “hijacked” food donations and used them as a weapon against secessionist groups in the northern provinces. Brauman accused the government of causing the deaths of more than 100,000 people by forcing them at gunpoint to leave their land and resettle.

Some Abuses

Brauman’s assertions are disputed by relief organizations and Western diplomats in Ethiopia, who say most of the donated food went to feed the starving. Relief officials agree, however, that abuses occurred in the resettlement program, which was designed to move farmers from drought-prone regions in the east to more fertile areas in the west. But they point out that the government recognized the problems when it suspended the program a year ago.

Whatever their differences with the government over policy, most relief officials here want to stay in Ethiopia and help the people protect themselves against the inevitable--the next famine.

“We need to be committed to seeing this thing through in the long term for the people,” a development expert with a Western embassy said. “This government will go eventually, but the people will still be here.”