Why Are They Still Starving? : Ethiopia: Famine relief money helped the south. But fighting hampers progress in the north, so hunger has returned.

It is a sad fact that, once again, famine has struck Ethiopia, the beleaguered African nation where only five years ago 1 million people died of starvation. Relief experts agree that 4 million to 5 million Ethiopians will die this year if food is not rushed to them within the next four months.

These are the same people who received more than $1 billion in aid in 1984 and 1985 from Americans and other Western donors, who responded with unprecedented generosity to grisly media images of starvation. How can millions of Ethiopians be hungry again? What happened to all that money? Is Ethiopia just a bottomless pit of need, consuming what it is given and producing only more misery?

As president of CARE, one of the organizations trying to help Ethiopians, I believe Americans deserve an answer to these questions.

The Ethiopian situation is complex and changing. The whole country is plagued by refugees, overpopulation, deforestation, lack of education and poor economic planning. But in a broad sense, there are really two Ethiopias--one that has made progress since 1985 and one that hasn’t. One Ethiopia is found in the northern third of the country, where war and drought have conspired to devastate struggling farmers. The other Ethiopia is the southern two-thirds of the country, where farmers had a pretty good year in 1989. Donations from 1984-1985 not only fed the people in the south, but they also helped create long-term improvements. Through CARE and other groups, many southern farmers terraced and reforested eroded hillsides, dug water reservoirs and controlled the destructive grazing by their livestock.

These activities won’t prevent the country’s frequent droughts. But they will make the dry spells easier to weather by protecting the fragile farmlands and conserving Ethiopia’s scant resources. These land-management projects worked so well in the province of Hararghe, for instance, that this year CARE completely halted its free-food distribution there for the first time since 1984.

Unfortunately, all this is in stark contrast to the northern third of the country. There, the provinces of Eritrea and Tigre have spent the years since the 1984 famine locked in Africa’s oldest civil war. The Eritreans were not ruled by the Ethiopian government before the withdrawal of the invading Italians during World War II. They are fighting to become a sovereign nation. The Tigrean culture differs markedly from the one that dominates the rest of the country; and Eritreans have become frustrated with the government’s policies. They are fighting for greater autonomy.

Both sides in the conflict admit that the toll on the 15 million subsistence farmers in the north has been severe. Development work that thrived in the south was hampered in the north by the fighting. The war has made the precarious existence of millions of Ethiopians impossible.

Is Ethiopia a hopeless disaster? I don’t think so. Peace is possible. Former President Jimmy Carter has brought the two sides to the negotiating table, and some small progress has been achieved. If the fighting were stopped, more trees could be planted, more family planning could be taught and so on. Ultimately, Ethiopia’s depressing tide of hunger and death could be stemmed. But it can’t happen if the world, weary of yet another famine, turns its back on the new danger. CARE and other relief and development organizations want Americans to know that their generosity did make a profound difference five years ago for millions of Ethiopians. Today, one part of Ethiopia is proof that progress can be made. The other is a stark reminder that much remains to be done.