‘Compassion Fatigue’

As drought, two guerrilla wars and governmental bungling again create the risk of famine in Ethiopia, there is hope that the terrible toll of 1984-85 will not be repeated. But that is by no means certain.

At the moment, governments have contributed about half the food aid required for the new year, according to the assessment of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But the private voluntary organizations, which handle almost all of the delivery details, are running low on money, and there has not been a repetition of the generous public outpouring of funds that was crucial in the response three years ago.

Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger, has praised the Reagan Administration for adding 105,000 tons in December to an earlier food-aid commitment of 142,000 tons. That is equal to almost half of all the food pledged thus far. The other principal donors have been the European Community, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Norway, Britain, the World Food Program, Sweden and Denmark.

As in the disaster of three years ago, relief missions are finding delivery within Ethiopia a major problem. Some roads are being reconstructed to permit passage of large trucks. An airstrip is being upgraded at Massawa to facilitate shipments from ports to Tigray, one of the provinces where an insurrection exacerbates the effect of the drought. An agreement has only recently been negotiated with rebels fighting in Eritrea to avoid a repetition of their attack last October on a relief column in which tons of food were lost.

The government of Ethiopia has responded more openly this year to the disaster, giving early warning to the international community. It has been slow to respond to appeals for reform in its rigid Marxist structures that favor collective farms, enforce massive movements of people and offer few incentives to individual farmers, according to U.S. officials. This has prompted forecasts of food shortages extending beyond the present drought, and will result in increased international pressure for reform.

But the most important problem of the moment is “compassion fatigue” in America.

The U.S. government relies entirely on the private groups for the distribution, nutritional monitoring and people-to-people programs that are essential to the success of the relief effort. The present flow of U.S. assistance is being distributed by Catholic Relief Service, CARE, Save the Children Federation, Food for the Hungry International, the League of Red Cross Societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Joint Relief Partnership, the Missionaries of Charity, and World Vision, according to the Agency for International Development.

Dramatic television films of emaciated children triggered an enormous response in public donations in 1984, enabling the private voluntary organizations to set up networks for distribution and to create health and nutrition services to reinforce the usefulness of the contributions. This year, however, resources of these voluntary organizations “are stretched very thin,” according to Thomas R. Blank, assistant AID administrator for external affairs. There are no pictures this year of desperate people in emergency encampments because, miraculously, relief workers have been able to discourage the encampments by direct delivery to villages.

“Hard as it is to say, I am afraid that, in terms of the impact of Ethiopia on the collective conscience, people are almost used to it, they almost expect it,” an official of Catholic Relief Services told us. There are exceptions. CRS received $1 million from an anonymous donor to replace the trucks lost in the convoy attack in October.

“The situation is the opposite from 1984-85,” an official of the Save the Children Federation said. “Then, the public was up in arms and the government was slow to respond. This year the government has been quick to respond and the public at large is nowhere.”

A relief field supervisors said: “We were optimistic on the ground about our ability for an outstanding response. The food supply was timely, coordination through the United Nations was in place, and we had the prospect of keeping to a minimum any movement of people, any catastrophic disruption, and death,” he said.

“It is very discouraging,” he continued. “The public is not responding.”