Worn Land Deteriorating : No Rain, but Ethiopia Puts Faith in Dams and Future

On the wind-swept outskirts of this ancient city, 1,400 men and women are building a dam over a barren ravine. Day after day, the workers dig their hands into the powdery soil, heap it onto long strips of cloth and ferry new layers to the top in a human assembly line.

There is no water in the ravine to dam, no hint of rain in the occasional puffy cloud overhead, no cattle to be watered, no plants to harvest or even irrigate, as far as one can see.

For Ethiopians, building an earthen dam in the midst of a drought is as much an article of faith as an investment in the future. But it’s one of the small attempts being made here to turn back tomorrow, which most experts say holds more rapid ecological decay, more frequent droughts and even more severe famines.

Drought and famine once were cyclical phenomena in Ethiopia, occurring every decade or so. Now Ethiopia’s northern highlands are deteriorating with alarming speed, and inexorable climatic changes are making large chunks of this dizzying landscape untillable. Today famine is endemic.

Ethiopia continues to fight, building dams, planting trees and moving people to more fertile ground. But the problems seem to dwarf the effort.

Even with good rainfall and bumper crops, Ethiopia cannot feed 2.5 million of its 45 million people. The highlands are worn out from too many years of farming and grazing and by farming methods that have not improved since the 10th Century. The population swells by 3,000 a day while the average income, at about 30 cents a day the lowest in the world, shrinks.

“Clearly, it’s downhill all the way in terms of food security,” said Michael Priestley, coordinator of the United Nations’ relief effort in Ethiopia. “Just to create a food reserve and improve agricultural production, you’re talking decades, not years.”

Only 50 years ago, the land around the dam project in Tigre province was on the edge of a forest, with groves of orange and lemon trees nearby. Now it is scarred by erosion and perpetual drought, and the dam is at the foot of a denuded, flat-topped mountain.

“We can’t know if it will rain,” Kiros Gazhahang, a mother of six, said the other day as she paused on top of the dam here. “We are working to get food. Our aim is to have food for our families and also seed to replant for next year.”

Kiros carries water in a clay container to the top of the dam, where it is sprinkled on top to help pack the dirt. The water is trucked to the site. Other women, with infants wrapped in cotton cloth on their backs, work in pairs, carrying soil on old relief-food bags stretched like a hammock between them.

Since the last famine, in 1984-85, 26 dams have been built by hand around here under a food-for-work program. Each worker receives about six pounds of grain a day. An additional 20 dams are planned or are under construction.

Gramashela Dam, a quarter-mile long and 40 feet high, will take about four months to build. It will never create a lake, but Agricultural Ministry officials say they hope it will save a little rainwater.

“We just want to protect the soil and have some water in the dry season for cattle and maybe some trees,” said Fesseha Yitaya, the government official overseeing the project.

When the dam is finished, the workers will return to their villages, plant next year’s crop--and again wait for rain.

‘13 Months of Sunshine’

Ethiopia promises tourists “13 months of sunshine,” a slogan that is painfully true today. The sun is shining more and more in the land of the 13-month Amharic calendar, and it worries everyone.

In 1984 and 1985, famine killed hundreds of thousands here. The rains returned in 1986, but only for a year. Less rain fell this year than in 1984, and drought has triggered another international effort to feed more than 6 million Ethiopians.

“The cycle of drought seems to have been drastically shortened,” said Rick Machmer, the U.S. Agency for International Development director in Ethiopia. “If the rains didn’t come this year, they might fail again next year and the year after that. We may be faced with a permanent situation of more drought than rain, which is a frightening prospect.”

The most vulnerable area is the northern highlands, a dramatic landscape of jagged mountains and mile-deep canyons that seems uninhabitable. Ethiopians live and farm nearly every flat surface, from breathtaking mountaintops a few hundred feet across and 12,000 feet high to narrow crescents of silt circling the wind-carved rock below.

Only a Few Tools, Animals

These highlands cover only one-fifth of the country, but they are home to 88% of the population, people who are among the world’s poorest and most isolated. Aside from a few tools and animals, they have no assets. Most live a day’s walk or more from the nearest dirt road and many days’ walk from the nearest town.

Most Ethiopians are subsistence farmers whose ancestors have worked this land and grazed cattle on this land for thousands of years, mostly under a feudal system that discouraged modernization. Centuries of technological advances have passed them by.

The wooden, ox-drawn plow was introduced into Africa here in Ethiopia 2,000 years ago, and farmers still use it. Only 2% have access to improved seed varieties, such as those resistant to drought. Only 7% use fertilizer.

Farming and grazing have damaged the land. Ethiopia has the largest number of livestock in Africa--70 million head, two-thirds of them in the highlands. The number of people, meanwhile, increases at 2.9% per year, one of the highest rates in the world.

Forests Disappearing

Such population pressures began the destruction of the countryside years ago. Now nature has taken over. Deforestation has been swift. About 40% of Ethiopia was forest at the turn of the century. That had fallen to 16% by 1950 and to less than 4% today.

Firewood had to be brought in by relief convoys in the last famine. Farmers still walk days to find wood, which remains the main source of fuel. They dig up dead trees, chop the roots into firewood and strap them to the back of a mule for the long journey home.

The disappearance of trees and grass has allowed rapid erosion. Each farm acre here loses 50 tons of topsoil a year. Already more than half the highlands is significantly eroded, and a U.S. AID study recently concluded that the amount of land incapable of sustaining crops will increase five-fold in the next 25 years.

With deforestation and erosion have come swift changes in the weather. Rainfall in Ethiopia’s highlands has been decreasing steadily.

Food Deficit Rising

Ethiopia’s food deficit continues to rise, even without drought. Last year, with a harvest only 4% below normal, the country needed 300,000 tons of imported food. By 1990, it will need to import 2 million tons of food annually to feed its people--even in non-drought years, a U.S. AID study concluded.

That is twice as much as Ethiopia was able to move through its ports at the height of the last famine. Machmer, the AID official, said, “I don’t want to be here in 1990, that’s for sure.”

It is the paucity of solutions that worries relief officials.

Reforestation projects make little headway. Catholic Relief Services, the private U.S.-based relief agency, is building stoves for Ethiopians that consume less fuel, but even that expensive project seems a very small step.

“Even if you do 1,000 stoves, it is not enough for millions of people,” said Brother Ceasare Bullo, a Catholic relief worker in Makale.

Resettlement Promising

One of the most attractive solutions to Ethiopia’s problems is to simply move people from the unproductive northern highlands to more fertile parts of the country. Ethiopia has thousands of acres of potential farmland in the west and south. Only 40% of the land available for farming in Ethiopia is being used, according to a recent study.

Most relief officials support the idea of resettlement, although U.S. diplomats and others have grave concerns about the way it is done. A resettlement program was suspended two years ago after Western diplomats accused the government of conducting it at gunpoint, breaking up families and leaving settlers on raw land without food or shelter.

The Ethiopian government has acknowledged that serious mistakes were made when it resettled 600,000 people in 1985 during the famine. It resumed resettlement a few weeks ago, moving 379 people--volunteers, the government said--from a food distribution center near Ibnat, in the highlands, to Pawe, the country’s largest resettlement area.

Showcase of Program

Pawe, southwest of Lake Tana in western Ethiopia, is the showcase of the resettlement program. It was a fertile, uninhabited river valley in 1985 when the government moved 75,000 people there. Now the Italian government is spending $200 million on Pawe, building a water system, roads, a hospital and one of the best airports in Ethiopia.

“We’ve seen all the resettlement camps, and they are better than where the people live now in the highlands,” said James Cheek, the U.S. charge d’affaires in Addis Ababa. “It’s certainly understandable that some people in their fifth or sixth drought would be ready to chuck it in. If resettlement is done on a small scale this time, it’s not likely to be a problem.”

But relocating drought victims is an expensive solution and, if done humanely, it will take decades.

In the meantime, relief officials suggest that the best way to insulate Ethiopians from food shortages is to provide incentives for farmers to produce more than they consume. By building up food reserves in years when rains are good, the country can survive a drought without a famine.

India Solved Problem

India, now facing one of the worst droughts of the century, has done this. The most severely hit people there are 93 million small-scale farmers and farm workers--15 times the number affected in Ethiopia this year. But India does not face a massive famine, as does Ethiopia, because in the past 20 years the Indians have increased their chances of surviving a drought by improving crop yields, adopting modern agricultural practices and building up buffer stocks of food.

None of this has been done in Ethiopia. Western donor nations blame the Marxist government’s agricultural policies for making it more vulnerable to drought. The government, on the other hand, blames the West for refusing to spend money on long-term solutions to Ethiopia’s problems.

U.S. officials argue that no progress can be made toward preventing famine until government policies change. Under those policies, food surpluses are purchased by the government at low prices. Therefore, subsistence farmers, who account for 90% of the country’s production, have little incentive to produce extra food.

Regime Divided on Reform

“There are forces in the government who would like to see reform,” Machmer, the AID official, said. “But theirs are technical arguments. As you go further up the line it becomes more and more an ideological question.”

Officials at the highest levels of the Ethiopian government are committed to “1950s-type, East European agricultural policies that have been proven not to work,” Machmer said.

For reasons that are largely political, Ethiopia receives very little in development aid. The Soviet Union contributes millions of dollars worth of military aid but little for economic development or famine relief. The West is a generous provider of famine relief but spends little on long-term solutions.

The United States has provided more than $500 million in emergency food aid since 1984, for example, but it contributes nothing for economic development. A resumption of long-term U.S. aid here seems unlikely as long as Ethiopia’s leaders remain committed to policies that the Americans consider doomed to failure.

Officials Blame Nature

Ethiopian officials say it is not the policies but centuries of feudalism and unpredictable forces of nature that have put the country in its predicament.

“We were not idly waiting to see another famine this time,” said Berhanu Jembere, chief of the government’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. “We’ve put a lot of effort into improving agriculture in this country. But unfortunately we have again fallen victim to the weather. There’s no substitute for rain.”

Ethiopia is reassessing its agricultural policy and looking for solutions, the country’s leaders say. Those solutions will take many years. But there is an abiding belief among Ethiopians, perhaps derived from centuries of history, that time itself is the answer to most of life’s difficulties.

They often sum up that philosophy in an old Amharic expression: “Slowly, an egg will walk.”