Aid Offsets Famine : Ethiopia--Will Relief Be in Time?

White-haired village elders with walking sticks led 6,000 farmers, herders, mothers and children down from the stark mountains into this swirling dust bowl the other day to collect a month’s supply of flour, beans and cooking oil.

By day’s end, the people had loaded their mules and their own thin shoulders with relief food and begun the long walk back to their empty cupboards and withered crops in the highlands, carrying with them the promise that there will be food here again next month.

Just three years after a devastating famine sparked one of the largest relief efforts in history, an even more severe drought threatens millions of Ethiopians. Relief agencies have responded by undertaking an expensive airlift and setting in motion a massive food distribution system.

Avoiding 1984-85 Famine

The question now: Will this relief effort work? Most experts say it can probably prevent a repetition of the famine of 1984-85, when 700,000 to 1 million people died. But much depends on prompt and generous donations of food and supplies and the safe movement of food over difficult terrain in the midst of two civil wars.

Officials say their goal is to get food to people early enough so that they will return willingly to their villages, as thousands did the other day at a food center run by the International Committee of the Red Cross here in Wukro. In the last famine, nearly a million people lost all hope, abandoned their homes and farms and formed more than 50 camps near large cities in a desperate search for food. That is where many of them died.

“It’s going to be an agonizing year; we’re going to be walking on a tension tightrope from week to week,” said Rick Machmer, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Addis Ababa, in a recent interview. “I was here in 1985, and I’m getting the same feelings now.”

More U.S. Aid Expected

Food needs are pressing. To avoid a break in the grain pipeline this spring, international donors must again pledge large quantities of food by the end of December. The U.S. government, which has provided 125,000 tons thus far, is expected to announce additional food aid this month.

The Ethiopian government has asked for 1.05 million tons of grain in 1988. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says the country needs 1.3 million tons. Either way, Ethiopia needs several thousand tons more than it was able to move through its ports at the height of the last famine.

The rugged face of northern Ethiopia, a frail provider even in the best of times, is dry and cracked today. Seeds planted in May have died. Food stocks from last year’s harvest are gone.

So little grain can be found that its price has quadrupled at the market. So many emaciated cattle are being sold that their prices have fallen by 80%.

Growing numbers of children are showing the frightening warning signs of starvation: shriveled fingernails, stunted growth, white hair. A chart in a relief worker’s office depicts the rapidly deteriorating health of Ethiopia’s children in the months preceding the last famine. It bears a close resemblance to this year’s chart.

The government estimates that 5.2 million Ethiopians will need international aid through 1988. AID puts the number at 6.4 million, and other relief officials predict privately that it may go as high as 8 million. That compares to the 7.9 million who were fed in 1985 and the 5.8 million in 1986.

For the farmers and cattle herders who scratch a meager living on the beautiful, barren highlands here, everything seems frighteningly similar to 1984. Some say it’s worse.

Dmtsu Dedimas planted barley, wheat and beans in May on his farm atop a narrow plateau near Wukro. But no rain fell in June or July. By the time the rains began in August, when it rained for just 10 days, it was too late. The drought of 1987-88 had already begun.

Northern Crops Failed

By early September, it was clear that all but a small part of the crop across Eritrea, Tigre and parts of other northern provinces had failed completely and that several million people, many living miles from the nearest road, would be without food at least until the next harvest.

When Dmtsu picked up his walking stick and led his wife and four young children on the trek to the Red Cross distribution center here, he was in a desperate situation.

He had run out of food and his herd of 25 sheep had dwindled to three. He had sold them, for about $7 each, to buy grain. But with everyone selling livestock, prices were low. Each sheep bought a two-day supply of food for his family.

At the food center here, on a dusty moonscape ringed by mountains, the 36-year-old farmer talked about the problem. He wore a green hat and turned his bearded face away from the wind. His wife sat quietly under a black umbrella, gazing at the stacks of grain.

Seeds ‘Never Came Up’

“This is serious for us,” Dmtsu said. “At least we had a little food last time. But this year we all planted and all the seeds just stayed there. They never came up.”

Without this relief food, he said, “all of us would die.”

At the hospital in Wukro, cases of severe malnutrition rose from 20 in October to 59 in November. A few months ago, about 40% of the hospital’s patients were children; today children occupy 95% of the beds. Four children died recently of malnutrition-related diseases.

“We are too late for some children; for most of them, though, we are just in time,” said Lou Bartels, a doctor at the hospital, which is run by the private relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). “If we only see seven or eight new cases a day, and the food continues to be distributed every month, there is still hope.”

The hospital has seen two cases recently of mothers who tried to starve their youngest children, either to allow more food for the rest of the family or to prove to relief workers that the family needs more food.

Girl Weighed 5 Pounds

Laile Selassie Aberha, almost 6 months old and weighing only five pounds, was brought to the hospital by her mother in late November. The doctor began treatment, but he was certain she would die.

Within two weeks, however, the baby had gained a pound and the mother, who has four other young children, was nursing her infant again.

“These children look like old men, but they are very strong-willed,” Bartels said.

Even in the best of times, children die here of malnutrition, and large numbers of Ethiopians need international assistance. Last year’s harvest was nearly normal, yet 3 million people needed relief food at least part of this year.

“People are not well-off, of course, but they are not starving,” a relief official in Wukro said. “For once in Ethiopia the humanitarian organizations came on time.”

The government and international relief agencies have set up 36 food distribution centers in Tigre province, which includes Wukro. More than 1.5 million people will need food in this province alone. At the Red Cross center here, about 150,000 people received rations this month.

“We have a well-ordered system, which is keeping people in good condition and giving them the confidence to work within the system,” said Michael Priestley, director of the U.N. relief effort in Ethiopia. “It means long walks, but Ethiopians are used to that.”

Distribution Vulnerable

Other relief officials are less sanguine. They say the food distribution system is vulnerable because it depends heavily on land travel, which was severely hampered by the Oct. 23 rebel attack on a U.N. food convoy moving through Eritrea province en route to Tigre.

Soldiers of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front attacked the convoy and destroyed 26 trucks carrying 450 tons of wheat--enough to feed 45,000 people for a month.

The Liberation Front, which has been fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia for 27 years, was sharply criticized by international relief agencies, many of which provide food to rebel-held areas from Sudan, Ethiopia’s neighbor.

Although food convoys began moving again days later, the attack had set the relief effort back.

The Ethiopian military was reluctant to allow food trucks onto the roads in Tigre province, where the separatist Tigre People’s Liberation Front operates, without sweeping for mines and posting guards along the route. Suddenly the trip between the capitals of Eritrea and Tigre, normally a one- or two-day drive, was taking a week or longer.

Relief officials had hoped they wouldn’t need to transport grain by air within the country because of the expense. To operate a Hercules C-130 plane costs $700,000 a month, three times the cost of ground transportation.

Planes Being Used

But the road problems left no choice. Three C-130s have begun ferrying grain from warehouses in Asmara, the Eritrean capital and staging point for relief food distribution throughout the north, to Makale, Tigre’s capital. Three Antonov cargo planes of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, have begun moving grain, and two additional C-130s are expected soon.

Relief officials complain that it took the Ethiopian government six weeks to approve their urgent request for the airlift. By the time the first planes arrived two weeks ago, it was very nearly too late.

“If those planes had arrived a week later, they would have had to carry picks and shovels to bury the dead,” said Brother Ceasare Bullo, an official with Catholic Relief Services in Makale.

Asked about the delays, Berhanu Jembere, the head of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, which is coordinating the effort, said: “There is a procedure for permissions in this country. It cannot go instantly.” He emphasized that the government “is giving top priority to food transportation.”

80% of Crop Lost

Thus far, food distribution has not been a serious problem in Eritrea, where 80% of the crop was destroyed by drought, because relief food arrives from abroad through the Eritrean port of Massawa on the Red Sea.

But Makale, in landlocked Tigre, has just enough food to last two weeks. A shortage of food stocks in Tigre has forced Catholic Relief Services to give out only half-rations at its food distribution centers.

“These people can’t make it on half-rations for long,” said Patrick Johns, the Catholic Relief Services director in Ethiopia.

Although relief officials are frustrated by the war and the slow-moving bureaucracy, most say the Marxist government has performed better than last time. During the 1984-85 calamity, the government ignored the famine until thousands were dying, refused to acknowledge the massive assistance from the United States and then embarked on a disastrous resettlement program that Western diplomats charged was rife with human rights abuses.

Timely Government Action

This time, the Ethiopians made a timely appeal for food, assigned high-level officials to coordinate famine relief and publicized U.S. government contributions to the relief effort.

The biggest fear among Western relief officials now is that people will start moving in search of food. At the height of the 1984-85 famine, Ethiopians showed up half-dead at shelters and the camps became known for rampant disease and mass starvation.

“You’ve got to do something fast when a drought occurs, and you just don’t know who’s going to slip through the net,” said James Cheek, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa. “It is inevitable that someone, somewhere is not going to get food. Camps seem inevitable now. But they probably were all along.

“One of the problems is that before Ethiopians go on the dole, they will exhaust everything they have. They eat their seed, sell their animals, sell their tools. And by the time they come to you they’re at the end of their rope.”

Some relief officials think people are already moving in an aimless search for food and perhaps are gathering in the hills outside cities in the north. Most agree that some camps will appear by the end of January.

“I hope camps are avoidable, but I would be surprised if we made it through 1988 without having some,” said Machmer, the U.S. AID official. “The horror, the worst parts of what happened last time, I think can still be avoided, though.”

In 1985, nearly 100 people were dying every day at a camp near Korem. Just a few days ago, about 4,000 people, including children carrying schoolbooks, had gathered at Korem. They received grain and cooking oil, and were sent back home, which in some cases was a five-day walk.

So far, Ethiopian relief officials have distributed food for 90,000 people at Korem. They say that all have returned home.

Geldof Notes Changes

Bob Geldof, the Irish singer who helped raise $140 million for famine relief here, returned to Korem for the first time in two years recently and was surprised at the changes.

“The chaos of last time appears to have been preempted,” he said.

In Wukro, 6,000 to 7,000 arrived every day for two weeks at the Red Cross distribution center. They were called from villages in the military gray zone, where government soldiers and rebels are both active but no one is in control.

Each person was registered here. Workers measured the children’s arms and checked their height, looking for signs of malnutrition. Then each person dipped his little finger in a tin can of ink, to prevent tries for second helpings.

Gebre Hailu had led 250 people in a half-day walk to the food stocks in Wukro. The 62-year-old village chief, who lost a brother and a sister to the last famine, said he had no food “but I still have some sheep to sell.”

At about 3 p.m., the food distribution began. Four families from the village of Azmi split up several hundred pounds of flour, beans and oil and loaded their mules for the six-hour journey home.

“We don’t know how long this will last; they say a month,” said Hailu Taka, father of one of those families. He had sold his last oxen and sheep for food a few days before. “We had become very hungry, but we are happy again,” he said.

Then Hailu and his fellow villagers set out for home, confident that they would return here in a few weeks to pick up another month’s supply. As the sun fell into darkness, they disappeared into the steep hills.