Shadow of Another Famine Brings Appeals by Ethiopia : Africa: Relief specialists welcome government’s candor but think calls may be premature, misleading.

The shadow of famine again hangs over East Africa: In nine countries from Djibouti to Rwanda, 20 million people are at risk, relief agencies say, and international donors are scrambling to meet emergency needs for food.

But there is disagreement in the international community over how advanced the threat is.

Some relief specialists believe that Ethiopia’s call for help--originally made last December and repeated often since--may have been premature and could obscure the fact that any widespread danger is likely to occur in 1995, not 1994.

“The government has been very open, and that’s greatly welcome,” said Mark Bidder, deputy coordinator for the U.N. Development Program. “There is a feeling, though, it may have gone a little overboard. It hasn’t made a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s made one out of a hill. We’re not in a crisis yet.”

Bidder said if this summer’s rains are inadequate, it is possible the current drought could turn into a famine of epoch proportions, such as the one in 1984, centered in Ethiopia’s Wollo province. That famine claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the Horn of Africa.

But after an ample harvest in 1992, sufficient rains between now and September could alleviate the likelihood of massive starvation, he said.

Drought is a recurring curse in the Horn of Africa, and in Ethiopia’s rural provinces north and south of Addis Ababa, people live on the edge of survival even in years of bountiful harvests.

Though fertile, the land is so intensely cultivated and deforested that people there have little hope of ever escaping the peril of malnutrition and the need for emergency supplies of wheat, soybeans and maize, agricultural experts said.

The Ethiopian government’s candor in calling attention to the early warnings of famine--the death of children in Bele, the airdrop of grain in Oromiya, bureaucratic bottlenecks that have delayed food shipments for months for lack of an official signature--is a dramatic departure from how two previous governments in Addis Ababa treated full-blown disasters.

When drought swept Wollo province in 1973, Emperor Haile Selassie, 81, tried to keep the disaster a secret, unwilling to admit that he was unable to care for his people.

While the death toll crept toward 200,000, Selassie was photographed in the splendor of his palace tossing scraps of fresh meat to his two Great Danes. The picture caused a national scandal, and Selassie was overthrown within the year by a group of enlisted men, ending a 44-year reign.

The leader of the group, Mengistu Haile Mariam, courted disaster in 1984 when he denied the existence of famine that had claimed many thousands of lives.

At the height of the calamity, he spent millions of dollars on a huge celebration marking the anniversary of his Marxist revolution.

Later, finally acknowledging the famine, he used food as a weapon, refusing to let relief agencies feed Ethiopians in regions controlled by anti-government forces. Mengistu was overthrown in 1991.

Since the 1984 famine, the international community has changed its emphasis in Africa from disaster response to crisis prevention.

“Any development program these days that doesn’t have the word sustainable on every page has no chance of getting off the ground,” a U.N. official in Eritrea said. But escaping Africa’s morass of man-made disasters that foster famine has not been easy.

J. Brian Atwood, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said here last month that about one-third of those facing food shortages in East Africa were at risk because of wars, primarily in Sudan, Somalia and Rwanda.

Internal insecurity also threatens the delivery of food in parts of Kenya and Djibouti.

Atwood’s mission to assess food needs in East Africa was made at the request of President Clinton, U.S. diplomats said, and was intended in part to help three governments--in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda--avoid crises that could threaten national stability. All three have adopted pragmatic economic policies and have been helpful in mediating regional conflicts.

But with the Cold War over, Atwood’s mission came at a time when Western governments are shifting developmental funds from Africa to Eastern Europe. Questions are also being raised about the usefulness of pouring countless dollars into countries whose leaders are required to provide little accountability.

U.S. aid to Kenya, for example, has been cut about in half, to $18 million. In southern Sudan, a region racked by war and starvation and ruled by an uncompromising Islamic fundamentalist government, the U.S. bill for emergency aid last year reached $350 million and “probably didn’t achieve anything,” an American aid official in Kenya said.

Washington also spent $1.5 billion trying to halt starvation and anarchy in Somalia. It was forced to retreat after Somali clans turned on U.S. soldiers.