As Drought Grows, Hunger Again Stalks Africa's Horn

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

June 11, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DENAN, Ethiopia —

In the village of Debanaag, no rain fell for three long, hot years. The livestock--250 cows, goats and donkeys--died one by one, and the herdsmen and their families for whom the animals were the main sustenance faced hunger, then starvation.

With her only child weak and sick, Ardo Sulub, 30, set off on foot on a 100-mile trek across the arid range land of southern Ethiopia in search of food and medical assistance. For 15 days, the ethnic Somali woman says, she walked in withering, dusty heat. She fed her son leaves plucked from trees and bushes and gave him what water she could scoop from riverbeds that had nearly run dry.

Now Mohammed Noor, 7, lies inert under a blue sheet at an emergency feeding and medical aid station here, his weary mother seated barefoot on the ground next to him, whisking flies away from his sweaty face. The boy’s forearms are spindly and emaciated--he is 4 feet tall but weighs a mere 31 1/2 pounds. Ardo Sulub found help for her son--but too late.

“This boy has tuberculosis,” said Fiona Clarke, an Australian nurse with the international relief group Doctors Without Borders. “There is absolutely no question that he will die.”

Mass hunger--and the devastating health complications that accompany widespread malnutrition, especially among the young--has returned to Ethiopia and other countries on Africa’s Horn, posing the region’s gravest humanitarian crisis in years.

“No one expected that Ethiopia in the year 2000 would witness another famine death,” Yitref Mekonnen wrote in Capital, a national business weekly.

Resources Dwindle as the Desperate Arrive

At the feeding center opened in Denan this April by the Belgian unit of Doctors Without Borders, five children ages 5 and younger are dying on average each day.

Alongside the town of one-story shacks that in normal times had a population of 10,000, 13,000 Somali nomads and villagers are now encamped on a flat, sunbaked plain, living in hastily assembled huts of cardboard boxes, plastic sheeting, burlap and corrugated metal that resemble inverted coconut shells.

Each day, more arrive--hungry, thirsty and, in the case of the children, often badly dehydrated, malnourished and sick.

“They don’t have anything to eat or drink, so they die,” said Clarke, 39, who began sobbing.

Ten countries of East Africa--Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Sudan--have been hard hit by the long absence of rain, with herders in southern and eastern Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya among the worst affected.

“The potential scale of the crisis that can develop from the current drought, unless large-scale preventive action is taken, is enormous. The lives of as many as 16 million people in the region are at risk,” Catherine Bertini, the U.S.-born executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, concluded after touring the region this spring as special envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

According to the World Food Program, no fewer than 1 million tons of food aid will be needed to feed people in the region this year.

In many cases, man-made factors have worsened the situation, making drought victims’ lives even more precarious. Ethiopia, embroiled in a 2-year-old border war with Eritrea, has sent hundreds of new, large-capacity trucks and numerous donkey trains north, to the opposite end of the country from Denan, to supply its army in the field.

“The bulk of the transportation has gone to the war effort, clearly,” said one outraged official with a European charity who has nearly 20 years’ experience in Ethiopia.

The government firmly denies that it places a higher priority on winning the war than on saving its citizens. It blames leading aid donors, including the World Food Program, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the European Union, for contributing to the crisis by borrowing from an emergency food reserve stockpiled by the aid organizations and not replenishing it in time.

The reserve, supposed to total 350,000 tons--enough to feed 4.5 million people for six months--had dropped to 50,000 tons by February, the Ethiopians say.

“Pledges were slow this year. International donors were slow to respond,” charged Berhan Gizaw, deputy head of the government’s disaster prevention and preparedness commission.

Whether from a dearth of transport or bottlenecks caused by foreign donors now rushing to make up for lost time, aid meant for the hungry is piling up next door in Djibouti, whose capital is the nearest major port for this landlocked nation. An 85,000-ton bulk carrier recently offloaded a cargo of U.S. wheat there.

“When enough trucks aren’t available for direct delivery, we move the food to warehouses in the Djibouti port area,” said Roberta Rossi, a World Food Program spokeswoman in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.

In Eritrea, the U.N. estimates that 750,000 people, or nearly a quarter of the total population, have been displaced by the war. Most are from the western grain-growing region and have fled their homes at a time when they should be planting crops for the vital autumn harvest.

“The nightmare scenario is that when the rains do come, the people will still be in the camps with no shelter, and there will be more and more we cannot reach,” Trevor Rowe of the World Food Program told the Reuters news agency.

Ethiopia, which accounts for 10 million of the people in East Africa believed to be at risk of starving to death, continues to levy 110% customs duties on the very vehicles imported by aid organizations to supply humanitarian relief.

Gizaw says that the 3-year-old policy is under review but that some foreign agencies have previously abused the duty-free privileges they enjoyed.

Officials from some foreign charities, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of official Ethiopian reprisals, also report attempts by the country’s military to commandeer their vehicles, evidently for use in the war effort. Others complain of a capricious bureaucracy.

“If I had my choice, I’d work with the Taliban any day of the week,” one frustrated foreigner said, referring to the Islamic fundamentalists who rule most of Afghanistan.

Charges Fly Over Who’s at Fault

In Djibouti, the harbor master recently told a Western reporter that 200 trucks donated by the European Union remained stuck on the wharf because of Ethiopian administrative procedures.

Ethiopian officials counter that they are doing all they can. The flow of food aid from Djibouti, Gizaw says, has on occasion topped 6,000 tons a day, a record amount. Instead of depending exclusively on foreign generosity, he says, Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, has set aside $40 million to $50 million to purchase 100,000 tons of food itself.

“This is the first time any Ethiopian government has spent this kind of money on relief,” Gizaw said.

Despite national and foreign efforts, a U.N. fact-finding mission in May found that food deliveries in the Somali regions of southern and eastern Ethiopia were running “one to two months behind schedule.” The weather hasn’t cooperated--in late April, it finally rained in this area for four days.

It was a welcome, if brief, respite from the drought, and a thin coat of green rapidly covered the rocky, arid plain. But the downpour also turned the rutted, unpaved roads into muddy, impassable quagmires, delaying distribution of food aid for as long as two weeks.

In Gode, 45 miles southwest of Denan, the U.N. food program by now should have stockpiled 1,800 tons of grain, lentils, vegetable oil, sugar and salt, says Jack Saenen of the Netherlands, who is in charge of local logistics for the agency. Those staples would provide a three-month cushion only for needy townspeople and wouldn’t feed the internally displaced who, as in Denan, have flocked to the town by the thousands.

Instead, the food stocks now total only 600 tons, and that’s all grain.

“At the end of the week, it’s gone,” Saenen said.

He says that he now has enough trucks at his disposal to distribute food to rural villages but that, because of banditry and ethnic tensions with Somalis, drivers from central Ethiopia dare not move in the region without military escorts.

“There’s not a shortage of trucks here but a shortage of soldiers,” Saenen said.

Armed men have already shot up a Doctors Without Borders Land Rover, killing the Ethiopian driver and wounding a foreigner. After bands of men carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles were seen near Denan, the feeding station cut its expatriate staff from 13 to seven--at a time when there are increasingly more mouths to feed and sick children to care for.

“It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket,” said Kostas Moschochoritis of Greece, who is in charge of logistics for Doctors Without Borders here.

In Gode, some health workers believe that the food crisis has already reached full-blown famine stage. This month, Save the Children USA took charge of a therapeutic feeding station built of wooden poles and green tarpaulins next to the local hospital.

Two weeks ago, the center was feeding an average of 222 children a day with high-calorie, protein-enriched milk and gruel. Now, the number of needy children has risen to 360, and each day, there are 25 to 30 new admissions.

Many of the youngsters are emaciated and sluggish, their bellies distended from worms. The skin of some extremely malnourished children has turned dull and lifeless, and their hair is orangish-brown--symptoms of the protein and caloric deficiency known as kwashiorkor.

As their mothers carry them, the thinnest and weakest of the children look on the world with big, glazed eyes. Throbbing veins bulge on forearms and legs where flesh and muscle seem to have melted away. Some of the children cry, but most are mute.

“Are these people in danger of death if external aid is unavailable?” Fitsum Assefa, an Ethiopian nutritionist at the Gode center, asked. “I look around at the cases I see here and say, ‘Yes.’ The most vulnerable part of the population is dying.”

“The crisis, as far as we are concerned, is getting worse,” said Jay Zimmerman, field office director for Save the Children USA in Addis Ababa. “The drought has not been alleviated. The food is now coming, but it is not getting out of secondary transport centers.”

Others involved in relief efforts refrain from using the highly charged word “famine,” noting that so far, it is mostly the very young and other vulnerable individuals who have succumbed to hunger and related health complications.

“This is a crisis situation in pocket areas,” said Rossi, the World Food Program spokeswoman. There is no comparison, she says, with conditions in 1984-85, when an estimated 1 million Ethiopians died of famine. But the situation could deteriorate further.

“My worst nightmare is if the long growing season fails,” said Judith Lewis of Jackson, Miss., director of World Food Program operations in Ethiopia. If the . . . rains, which should begin this month, are late or sparse once again, she said, “it’ll be a real catastrophe.”

Farmers Reportedly Eat Their Seed Grain

People who live from the soil in other regions of Ethiopia should plant their wheat, maize, sorghum and a locally grown grain known as teff between now and August and harvest the crops in the autumn. But conditions in areas such as Tigray, Gonder and Welo are already so desperate that, according to Ethiopian officials, farmers have eaten the grain they normally keep for seed and have sold their hoes and other farming tools for a bit of money.

In the Somali areas, up to 80% of the 6.1 million cattle are believed to have perished for want of food and water, according to the U.N. survey.

“Even the camels in my village died two months ago,” said Adra Abdi, 50. She walked 30 miles to the Doctors Without Borders center in Denan, where her 1-year-old granddaughter--suffering from acute malnutrition, a chest infection, diarrhea, worms, anemia and tuberculosis--is receiving injections of oral rehydration salts and enriched milk every 10 minutes through a nasogastric tube.

The fact that the unavailability of food in remote areas is driving the hungry toward feeding stations and population centers poses new problems. The arrivals must be provided with drinking water, so it has to be found somewhere, chlorinated and trucked in, usually by the same hard-pressed aid agencies that are trying to supply food.

With overcrowding, hygiene becomes problematic. At the Gode center, toddlers defecate and urinate on the bare ground outside the feeding tents and near the metal drums where tank trucks unload drinking water. Potential outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis, cholera and other sometimes fatal diseases are now major concerns.

There is a lack of doctors, nurses and other qualified personnel in the Somali regions, where many people from other areas of Ethiopia do not feel welcome.

“We’re working day and night,” said Dr. Tedbabe Degfie, a physician who came from Addis Ababa to work with Save the Children USA in Gode.

“By now, there should have been an improvement,” nutritionist Assefa said. “Maybe stopgap measures have been taken, but the number of severely malnourished children is growing every day.”

On Wednesday, the United Nations launched an emergency appeal for $378 million to provide food and other critically needed assistance to drought victims in Ethiopia and the four other countries most severely affected by the drought: Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia and Djibouti.

“Timely assistance is the difference between survival and death for a large section of the 13.4 million people, mostly women, children and elderly persons [at risk in these countries],” Bertini said. “If relief aid is late and inadequate, this humanitarian crisis can easily become a human tragedy of historic proportions.”

For aid workers trying to cope with the crisis on the ground, each life saved brings a sense of victory. In the first week of June, among the children being helped at the Gode feeding station, there was only one known death. Staff members caution, however, that they are uncertain about the fate of at least nine other boys and girls who were taken away by their mothers. They may still be alive--or they may be dead.

There is one child whose recovery fills the overworked staff with hope. Amina Jama Hussein, who’s 9 or 10, weighed less than 30 pounds when she arrived.

“Two days ago, she was barely able to move,” Assefa said.

Gently coaxed by the nutritionist, the young Somali, who clutches her knees as she sits in silence on the floor of a feeding tent, can now slowly, wobblingly, but finally, stand.

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How to Help

These charities are among those accepting contributions to help people in the Horn of Africa.

American Red Cross

International Response Fund

P.O. Box 37243

Washington, D.C. 20013

(800) 435-7669

Spanish: (800) 257-7575

https://www.redcross.org

CARE

151 Ellis St. NE