Aid Workers Worry About Helping Somalis Too Much : Africa: Building self-reliance is vital to the success of relief efforts. But many refugees now prefer dependence.

ASHO-GABO, Somalia — In a midday breeze as hot as the breath of a furnace, a dozen men in calf-length skirts worked slowly across the field, deftly slicing off the ripe heads of yard-high sorghum plants with their daggers.

Behind, young boys with metal-tipped hoes followed, hacking down the remaining stalks, dry and brittle as straw, so they could be used later to feed cows and camels.

It was hot, dusty and sweaty work in the heat of equatorial Africa, but the Somalis who performed it expressed happiness that after two years of drought, famine and armed strife, they were finally tilling the parched brown soil again.

“I don’t know what the town looks like,” said Isak Aden Ibrahim, 50, who lost his son, his wife and a daughter when the family hut was burned down during Somalia’s civil war. “I was born here. I was taught here to harvest this farm. Why should I leave my work when I was born here and would die without it?”

As the colossal foreign effort to end starvation in Somalia moves into a new phase, that of rebuilding a shattered economy and society under the watchful eye of U.S.-led forces, international aid agencies and charities hope Ibrahim’s proud self-reliance will be the rule.

“If someone is helping us with seeds, which we then use to work with our own hands, we need such help,” Ibrahim, a respected elder in his village, said approvingly. “But we don’t need anyone to tell us to go to the town and get free food.”

Already, however, there are questions of this sort as Operation Restore Hope begins its third month. Thousands of refugees who fled famine or fighting have refused to go back home or are trying to extort money or goods for their cooperation in returning.

So much foreign food has flooded into the famine belt of central and southern Somalia that a 110-pound bag of sorghum, a cereal grain that the Somalis eat after it is made into porridge or a pancake, sells now in the town of Baidoa, 15 miles south of here, for 50,000 shillings, or a quarter of the price it fetched in October.

If massive food aid continues, there will consequently be no pure economic incentive for Somali farmers to go home, caution specialists like French agronomist Francois Grunewald of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The past foul-ups of aid organizations are notorious, from Africa’s Sahel region to Ethiopia. “How do we avoid driving farmers into the dependency syndrome?” is how Grunewald sums up the problem. It is complicated in Somalia by the fact that even now some villages are still desperately hungry while others have plenty to eat.

From a vantage point like the grassy clearing in the middle of Asho-Gabo, the dilemma of relief aid is easy to understand. “We don’t get enough for what we produce,” complained Khadija Ali Malin, 60, a native of this village of round brush-thatched huts made of dried mud and manure.

When visitors showed up one morning, she and eight other women carrying long staves stopped pounding the sorghum, which looks like bunches of small orange or white grapes, in their wooden mortars and spoke of Asho-Gabo’s new concerns.

“Now we have to take three sacks of sorghum to market to buy a piece of clothing,” said Malin, a petite, buck-toothed woman dressed in a gray robe knotted over her shoulder. “We used to get clothes for just half a sack of meal.”

Malin and her 500 fellow villagers fled into the bush when the fighting reached the area last April. One hundred of them died as dictator Mohamed Siad Barre tried in vain to regain power.

The bones of some victims still litter the surrounding savanna. Others lie under little unmarked dirt mounds beside the pond of still-green water where both humans and livestock drink, and by the unpaved track leading to Baidoa.

“Nowadays we are all right, but we do not have enough clothes, because Siad Barre’s troops came and took all of our clothes, everything we had stored,” Malin said. “I think we now have enough food for two or three months. If it runs out, we will eat grass if we must.”

The Irish charity Concern has supplied sacks of wheat to Asho-Gabo to stop the hunger and the dying. But the village women were skeptical that they could count on such generosity forever--another reason driving Somalis to resume work.

“Who is going to farm our farms if we go to Concern and say, ‘Give us food’?” asked Fatima Mohamed Abdirahman, who lost three siblings in the famine. Her voice heavy with incredulity, she asked, “Are you sure that Concern will give us food for the rest of our lives?”

The harvest now under way in Somalia’s central region, the first in the past two years, will not be abundant because a fungus known as sorghum smut has attacked many plants, turning the heads a fuzzy black. For a few more months, some supplementary food aid will be needed.

According to CARE, villages that produce well during the current deyr, or October-to-December growing season, will have their grain crop bought up and given to the poor performers to use as seed.

For the next season, known as gu, when rain is more plentiful and the harvest as a rule much larger, 250 metric tons of sorghum seed will be given out in the region around Baidoa.

“I think that by distributing seeds for this coming season, if farm production is enough, people will then have enough seeds on their own,” said Abdullahi Abdi Rahman, a local agricultural specialist for CARE. “And I think the food produced will then be sufficient.”

The organization hopes to phase out food aid after the gu harvest in midsummer.

As for the Red Cross, it will now buy inside Somalia half of the seed that it gives Somali farmers, instead of importing it all, Grunewald said. That will support local prices, he explained, as long as other aid organizations don’t keep dumping free sorghum into the economy.

It is in the provincial center of Baidoa, formerly the sorrow-filled heart of Somalia’s starvation belt, that the potentially disruptive effects of foreign assistance are most evident, along with the many benefits. Recently, for instance, 3,000 refugees tried to wangle more assistance in exchange for their pledge to return home.

CARE had organized feeding stations for their 120-mile walk back to the Bardera area, which would have lasted three weeks. The 1st Royal Regiment of the Australian army, which took over in Baidoa last month from the U.S. Marines, agreed to transport the aged, infirm and young by truck.

But then the Somalis held out for more. They asked for medicine and blankets that foreign aid workers did not believe they actually needed. They wanted two sacks of grain per person that they could sell in the market to raise capital to pay for their own motor transport.

CARE refused. “The negotiations lasted for two weeks, and then these people just sort of melted away,” said Peter Kieseker, an Australian who runs CARE’s Baidoa office.

“Now that it’s harvest time, we’re seeing a big emptying of the (refugee) camps,” Kieseker explained. “But there may be a residual core of nomads who lost their camels or people who have grown enamored of the city. In those cases, we will have to discontinue food aid.”

Baidoa, whose inhabitants last fall resembled walking skeletons, shows the striking success of Operation Restore Hope. With something like half of the former population of 140,000 reportedly still alive and in town, the tea shops along the narrow dirt road to the white-domed mosque are open again and selling fried doughnuts, boiled eggs, coconuts and green grapefruit.

In the dusty marketplace, merchants have returned to sell chewing tobacco twisted into ropes, sugar in cones made from newspapers, terra cotta jars of camel’s milk and secondhand clothes from Saudi Arabia. Aspiring peddlers have fashioned themselves stalls from corrugated roofs stolen during the civil war.

Raw numbers confirm that Baidoa is well on the way to recovery. In September, the town’s most terrible month, almost 6,000 people, adults and children, died from starvation or Somalia’s internecine clan warfare. Last month, the death total was 247.

“We are so happy because the rate of the day goes down,” said Adan Ahmed Isak, assistant manager of the municipal office of the Somali Red Crescent Society. “And the refugees keep getting less and less, since they are going home.”

A minority, however, seem well on the way to dependency or, like the people from Bardera, want a better deal. According to Kieseker, large-scale food drops would now be counterproductive in the Baidoa area because they would “develop a dependency.”

Although people may still be starving as close as 25 miles west of the city, where bandits are still active and transport poor, the town’s market boasts plenty of grain.

Wielding a long needle, Nuri Isak Hasan carefully stitched up a 50-kilogram sack of U.S.-supplied sorghum one afternoon recently as she talked about market conditions. She said prices are now actually on the rise.

But the wizened woman merchant said that with all the foreign grain available, “I don’t need to go to our farmers.” After a pause, however, she said she thought Somali sorghum tastes best--yet another encouragement to her country’s peasants to go home.

“If the farmers brought me more food than they do now, we wouldn’t need these bags from America,” Hasan said.

To avoid swamping Somali farmers, CARE spokeswoman Cynthia Osterman says conditions in each provincial market will have to be monitored and relief grain supplies stepped up or limited in response to the conditions.

Wary of the economic dangers, Save the Children-USA is also changing its approach from pure relief to include a cash-for-labor public works project to clear vital irrigation canals.

“If we keep supplying free food to areas where people are producing their own, it destroys the market system, the morals and feelings of growers,” said Abdi Abdullah Hussein, an acting team leader for Save the Children. He scoffed when asked if Somalis might become addicted to aid. “The past two years have taught them that even if they are hungry, the world might not listen,” Hussein said.

As for the U.N. World Food Program, which distributes government-donated food aid, it has already begun a project known as “monetization” to prevent the reviving, yet vulnerable, Somali market from being glutted with free or cheap food.

Already 340 tons of foreign wheat flour have been auctioned off in 19 lots to Somali traders, who are then supposed to resell to Somalis. The operation raised a half-billion shillings--enough banknotes to fill a third of a 20-foot-long container--which will then be used to pay the wages of Somalis hired for development projects.

“This is a useful tool for getting more food to where it’s targeted and for distributing income further down the social scale,” said Bob Harari, monetization officer for the World Food Program. Aid workers such as CARE’s Kieseker suspect that the scheme will chiefly allow a few shrewd Somalis to make big profits.

A minority of refugees are also proving a problem. At one Baidoa camp named Horsehead, 1,500 people now live behind walls of honey-colored stone. Some have erected tents of flimsy green plastic, but many others have slept on the stony ground or in roofless buildings nearby for months.

“We don’t have the food to go back to Oddur, and there is no transport,” Baray Omar Ibrahim, 37, said as flies buzzed around her face. “If we are given transport and food, and the NGOs (non-governmental organizations, or charities) help us, we would like to go back there.”

A mother of eight, Ibrahim watched one of her children die during the trek to Baidoa. Three more then died in the camp. She and other people at Horsehead say they informed CARE in writing many times of their wish to go back home but never got a reply.

A woman sitting in the shade by Ibrahim said she wants 200,000 shillings, or about $50, so she can buy milk, sugar and clothes before she goes home. White-bearded Omar Hussein Mohamed, 64, chimed in: “We get no clothes here, only porridge.”

“We are not ignoring them--they are fit enough to go home,” Jane Black of CARE said after a small delegation from Horsehead delivered the camp’s complaints in person. “All they need to do is come with a list of those who want to return to their village, and we will help them.”

Although CARE will help the refugees organize their return home, it has learned through bitter experience not to furnish the transport.

Kieseker laughed when asked how. “Other NGOs did agree to truck people back. And what happened? They returned to the camps four days later. They had seen Mum, checked out the crops and assured themselves everything was fine at home.”

Dahlburg of The Times’ Moscow bureau was recently on assignment in Somalia.