Famine: Hunger stalks Ethiopia once again -- and aid groups fear the worst

By Michael S. Serrill

They look like the scrawny camp followers of a medieval army as they gather under a huge bluff called Dongordo. The earth is boiled beige, with hardly a blade of green. There are nearly 7,000 of them, and they began assembling here long before dawn. Dressed in ragged homespun cotton and wrapped in long shawls called netela, they come in entire families, grandfathers and grandchildren. The men hold herding sticks; the women carry babies bound to their backs with cloth. And then there are the youngsters, some of them naked and with their heads shaved except for a single tuft in front. They are strangely silent.

The multitude comes from two Ethiopian villages, Asbi and Habes, in the dusty, barren hills to the north. Some walked all day and all night across 31 miles of craggy terrain to reach this scorched patch just outside Wukro, a district capital in the province of Tigre. Once again a drought has cursed Tigre, and once again the hungry have come to receive food from relief workers. Family after family moves past the rough wood table to register for the donations. Each supplicant dips a finger in purple dye to ensure that there is no cheating for seconds. "It is worse this year than it was in 1984 and 1985," laments Chief Elder Muboulle Osman, a tall, worried-looking man of about 50. "There are 72,000 people in this area, and we have no food, not even grazing for our animals. Without this," he gestures toward a long, green tarpaulin piled high with wheat flour, beans and grain, "we would starve and die."

Before the families receive their ration of food, the children are examined by health workers. Their eyes are peered at; their skin is checked. The aides take measurements of each child. If he or she is too small, it can be a sign of chronic malnourishment. Danish Nutritionist Birthe Pedersen, who works for the International Committee of the Red Cross, is measuring an eight-year-old boy. The upper part of his sticklike arm is 9.8 cm around; a normal child's arm is about 15 cm. After the boy walks away, Pedersen looks grim. "He will not live very long," she says.

Three years ago, a famine began to strike Ethiopia with apocalyptic force. Westerners watched in horror as the images of death filled their TV screens: the rows of fly-haunted corpses, the skeletal orphans crouched in pain, the villagers desperately scrambling for bags of grain dropped from the sky. What started out as a trickle of aid turned into a billion-dollar flood. The U.S., the largest donor, sent $500 million, and that does not include millions in private contributions. Irish Rocker Bob Geldof enlisted the help of his fellow musicians, dubbed his crusade Band Aid and raised $140 million. The rescue effort was plagued by delays and controversy, and some 1 million Ethiopians eventually died. But more would have perished if the world had not responded so generously.

Today Ethiopia is in the midst of another drought, and thousands of peasants are again on the move, trekking across the parched landscape in search of that bag of flour or handful of beans that will keep them going for a few more days or weeks. Ethiopia, which has earned the unhappy honor of being rated the globe's poorest country by the World Bank (average annual per capita income: + $110; infant mortality rate: 16.8%), is on the brink of disaster again. At least 6 million of its 46 million people face starvation, and only a relief effort on the scale of the one launched three years ago will save them. Some of Ethiopia's needs have already been met, but the grain still required could be the difference between hunger and death for millions. As the cry goes out once more for food and money, the sympathetic cannot be faulted for wondering why this is happening all over again. Is the latest famine wholly the result of cruel nature, or are other, man-made forces at work that worsen the catastrophe?

Elsewhere in Africa, conditions are only slightly less precarious. Millions of people up and down the continent face spending Christmas Eve on empty stomachs. Many will surely die unless food shipments arrive early in 1988. The United Nations' World Food Program puts relief requirements for 15 needy countries at 2.7 million metric tons (the 15: Angola, Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe). Only half of this goal has been met so far by donors.

The situation in Ethiopia is not yet as bad as it was two years ago, when hundreds died daily of hunger and disease in mass feeding camps. As of last week there was enough food to last for a month and enough promised in the international aid pipeline to nourish the country through April. While thousands of peasants have been temporarily uprooted from their villages, they have learned the lesson of 1984-85 and have gone in search of food before they are too weak to travel. U.N. officials say that for the moment there are no permanent feeding camps, where more died of rampant infectious disease than of hunger the last time around. Those who gather at Wukro go back to their villages after receiving a month's supply of food, then return in a month or so.

But things could rapidly deteriorate if the available food cannot be distributed quickly enough. "The next few weeks are crucial," said Dr. Goran Hanson, a Swedish Red Cross worker in Addis Ababa. "If food and transport do not arrive in time to keep people in their villages and prevent them from gathering in famine camps, it will simply be disaster. We desperately need food, trucks and planes. We are now short of all three."

The response from the West has again been generous. Last week BBC Correspondent Michael Buerk, whose reporting first alerted the world to the scope of the last famine, led an appeal that raised $650,000 in five days. Weeks before the latest drought attracted publicity, the major private food- aid agencies -- the Red Cross, Oxfam, Caritas, Care and Catholic Relief Services -- were shipping food by sea and air and distributing it to the needy.

Why, after two short years, do hundreds of thousands, even millions, again face starvation? While Western experts primarily blame the lack of rain, many place much of the responsibility on the shoulders of Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose rigid and secretive Communist regime has done little to avert another tragedy. Not only does the Addis Ababa government seem more concerned with putting down various insurgencies than with feeding the hungry, but it has also continued policies that seem designed to aggravate rather than resolve problems of poverty.

Those policies include a population-resettlement program, the opening of Soviet-style collective farms and a "villagization" effort that moves farmers off their isolated homesteads and into government-built settlements. The collective farms are such a doctrinaire Stalinist scheme that even the Soviet Union has urged officials in Addis Ababa to scale back their ambitious plans.

Geldof, who received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his Band Aid efforts, was back in Ethiopia last week, and his indictment of Mengistu's role in the new famine was harsh and to the point: "I would say that the cardinal responsibility of any government is to feed its own people, and any government refusing to do that is irresponsible."

In 1984 hundreds of thousands had already starved to death before the government admitted to a famine. And Mengistu, a former army major with a tendency toward the grandiose, was widely denounced for spending an estimated $100 million to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie. There are signs he may be curbing his spendthrift ways: in September, when the country was renamed the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Mengistu opted for a cocktail party instead of a banquet.

Like much of Africa, Ethiopia has always been subject to ecological disaster. Droughts and famines were reported as early as 253 B.C. In the great drought of 1888, a third of the population is said to have died from malnourishment and disease. This latest calamity is part of a 30-year pattern that has seen the rains repeatedly fail along the Sahel, the wide swath of land that cuts Africa in half just below the Sahara. After the 1984-85 drought, which killed an estimated 2 million people in Africa, there was a brief period of uncommon optimism in Addis Ababa. In 1985 and 1986 the rains were good for the first time since 1981. Though hunger persisted, no one was starving. When the rains came on schedule last June, it looked as if the nation would have a third year of good luck. But July was bone dry -- not a drop of water the entire month. Stubbornly hopeful, farmers replanted. In August the rain sputtered, then, late in the month, stopped. The crops withered and died.

Worst hit was the far northern province of Eritrea along the Red Sea, where the crop failure exceeded 80%. More than 40% of the harvest was lost in Tigre, 44% in Wollo and 35% in Harar, the Ogaden desert region that juts into Somalia. Altogether, nine of Ethiopia's 14 provinces are suffering food shortages.

In this age of the green revolution, with crop yields skyrocketing, drought no longer automatically means famine. India, for example, is now in the midst of its worst drought in decades, but because it has a food surplus and a relatively organized system for feeding the hungry, few are expected to starve. Usually it is the combination of drought, mismanagement and civil war that brings famine. Ethiopia is afflicted with all three.

Getting the food to the hungry is made more difficult by inadequate port facilities, poor or nonexistent roads and insufficient planes and trucks to transport food to rural areas. But the biggest block in the pipeline is civil strife. The government is battling 23 rebel groups and factions in every part of the country. The two strongest insurgent armies are in Tigre and Eritrea, the provinces hit hardest by the drought. Eritrea has been in rebellion against the government ever since it was annexed by Ethiopia in 1962, and a guerrilla movement began building in Tigre in 1977.

During the last famine the rebels and international agencies had a policy of live and let live. But in late October, Eritrean People's Liberation Front guerrillas attacked an unguarded convoy of 23 trucks on its way from Asmara, capital of Eritrea, to Mekele, capital of Tigre. One driver was killed, and the trucks -- loaded with 674 tons of food, enough to feed 30,000 people for a month -- were destroyed by grenades. The E.P.L.F. claimed that some of the trucks contained military equipment, a charge that U.N. officials deny. Since then, the E.P.L.F. has attacked two Ethiopian military-civilian convoys that reportedly included food trucks.

The rebel sabotage brought the entire operation for Tigre and Eritrea to a halt for more than a month. Not only were the convoys under threat from Eritrean and Tigrean rebels, but even those agencies willing to risk assault could not move their trucks because the government closed the roads. "If many people die this year and next, it will not be due to drought but the politico- military situation," said one relief worker.

Convoys are moving again during daylight hours in Eritrea, with agency staffers driving the perilous roads at their own risk. But much of Tigre remains cut off; the Tigrean People's Liberation Front has demanded that the Mengistu government rescind its resettlement policy before it guarantees the safety of the food trucks.

Resettlement is an ambitious government scheme to move 1.5 million peasants from the overcrowded and barren north to the more fertile south. While international agricultural officials acknowledge that the program is a legitimate effort to solve some of the country's long-term social and economic problems, they charge that in past years the Mengistu government carried it out with unnecessary cruelty. According to some Western diplomats, the regime broke up families and forced villagers to move to camps that had no housing, no water, no health facilities and often no food. Of the 600,000 northerners who were resettled during the last famine, 100,000 died, according to Doctors Without Borders, a Paris-based relief group. The government ejected the group from the country at the end of 1985 after labeling its charges "preposterous." Nonetheless, Mengistu suspended the resettlement program in early 1986, only to restart it last month. So far, 7,000 "volunteers" have been moved south, and the government plans to transfer up to 300,000 next year.

The rebels assert that the real motive behind the program is to persecute Eritreans and Tigreans and drain the rebel fronts of potential recruits. Dr. Frederick Machmer, head of the U.S. relief team in Addis Ababa, believes the rebels are disrupting the aid effort so the international community will accept "that they are a force to be reckoned with and that they control areas of the north." Geldof, whose organization owned some of the trucks blown up in October, finds the tactics of both sides despicable. Said he last week: "To attack food trucks and seal off roads in these conditions is tantamount to mass murder."

The convoy attacks are all the more tragic because the international agencies were well prepared to cope with the famine this time around. The U.N. and the Ethiopian government kept abreast of agricultural conditions through an "early warning system" that included satellite surveillance of farming areas. Months ago, at the first sign that the rains might fail, the agencies acted. One of the first nations to dispatch aid was the U.S., whose Agency for International Development is still bitter over charges that it did not do enough during the last crisis.

AID dispatched 10,000 tons of food to Ethiopia on May 7, when crops failed in Harar. When the rains failed in the highlands in July, 10,000 tons were sent to bolster the country's reserves. And when it was certain that a new drought had begun in August, the U.S. approved the delivery of 115,000 tons, valued at $43 million. The first 30,000 tons are scheduled to arrive this month.

In Washington, Reagan Administration officials speak proudly of the U.S. contribution two years ago and now. Said one: "The last time around we got criticized for not doing enough, but we spent half a billion dollars trying to help starving people. What did the Russians do? They gave Ethiopia two planes." The Soviets insist they gave much more, including food, medicine, blankets and tents, and they are pouring in humanitarian aid now. Western experts say these claims are overstated.

Despite a continuing flow of arms from Moscow, Western diplomats suspect that the Soviets are not happy with their ally. When Mengistu visited Moscow in April, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev cautioned him to "proceed from realities and not outrun stages of development." Politburo Member Lev Zaikov was reportedly blunter when he visited Addis Ababa in September.

Last Saturday the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has been monitoring the drought situation from the start, issued a new report that increased the projected food need for 1988 from 950,000 tons to 1.3 million tons. So far, 550,000 tons have been promised by aid groups, or 42% of what will be needed. Michael Priestley, the U.N. official who coordinates the overall relief program in Ethiopia, stresses that more aid must be committed immediately. "It will take five months for a food shipment to get here if it ) is pledged this week," he said. "If we don't get the pledges now, there will be a break in the pipeline."

Forty-two thousand tons of food are currently in Ethiopia, with shipments arriving daily. By the end of this month, an additional 90,000 tons are expected, thus ensuring Ethiopia enough food through Christmas if some of the hungry are put on three-quarter rations. Relief workers are racing to distribute food. Rebel attacks and logistical problems have cost valuable time, however, and in the past few days the pace has quickened. Last week three transport planes left Europe for Ethiopia and are now airlifting food from Asmara, near the Red Sea port of Assab, to Mekele. The European Community, which organized the operation, eventually hopes to deploy ten planes. "The airlift is vital," says Priestley. "But 700,000 people in Tigre need food immediately, and the aircraft must be backed up by trucks. If we don't start widespread distribution, there will be famine camps."

FAO officials are also sounding the alarm. "In terms of organization, we are better equipped this time," says Peter Newhouse, a senior FAO economist. "But if donation decisions are not made immediately, and it's not raining in Ethiopia by March, then we are in trouble. We will move from a disaster to a catastrophe."

The tragedy that afflicts Ethiopia also plagues much of Africa. The belt of privation cuts a ragged T through the continent. The horizontal bar is made up of the famine-prone nations of the Sahel; the vertical bar extends from the Sudan down through Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique and into tiny Lesotho. To the west of this scythe of hunger lie Zaire and Angola.

The worst threat of famine is in war-torn countries and their neighbors. Sudan, for example, is home to about 975,000 refugees, 70% from Ethiopia and the rest from Uganda, Zaire and Chad. While traditionally gracious hosts to those in need, the Sudanese are also enduring a drought and are rapidly losing patience. Earlier this year Ethiopian refugees streaming into the Sudanese border town of Kassala were attacked by mobs. "We have been involved in refugee problems since the Congo crisis of the 1960s," says Al-Amin Abdul Latif, Sudan's Ambassador to Egypt. "Enough is enough."

One of Africa's neediest cases is Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony on the Indian Ocean that is almost as poor as Ethiopia. Mozambique has been embroiled in civil war from the moment it became independent in 1975. Its economic infrastructure has been destroyed by rebels, and the U.N. estimates that 6 million people face starvation in the west and north, where reliefworkers are afraid to go. Says a Mozambican army officer who recently toured some of the worst-hit areas: "I talked to people who had barely enough flesh to cover their skeletons. Their bones made noises under the skin."

In Angola, where the Soviet-backed government is battling South African- supported rebels, the famine is mostly man-made. In some disputed areas, there are acres of ripe grain that cannot be harvested because the fields are laced with finger-size mines. Relief convoys find few passable roads and are in constant danger of attack from rebels. Though statistics are hard to come by, those who suffer most in Angola seem to be the young. The U.N. Office of Emergency Operations reported in 1986 that up to 45% of the children in Huambo province, where guerrilla activity is common, suffered from malnutrition.

Another nation in agony is Malawi, which is suffering from both disastrous crop failures and an influx of 300,000 refugees from neighboring Mozambique. "Unless massive food supplies are brought in urgently," says a Western aid official, thousands will die.

Even when the rains come, they can be a cruel gift. Heavy downpours swept over parts of southern Africa two weeks ago, breaking a harsh drought. But they also destroyed some of the more delicate plants that had survived the dry spell, and the soggy ground will hamper distribution of maize meal recently shipped into the area by the U.N.

Will Africa, fabulously rich in natural resources, ever end the cycle of war, disease and overpopulation that helps to keep it poor and famished? Most African governments, including those much less radical than Ethiopia, continue to be wedded to quasi-socialist, postcolonial economic policies that reduce agricultural productivity, even as populations soar and create a voracious demand for more food. "In contemporary Africa, both rural starvation and rising levels of urban employment are the outcome of a set of agricultural policies designed to subsidize the cost of living of urban consumers at the expense of rural producers," says Michael Lofchie, an Africa expert at UCLA. Since 75% of Africa's people still live in rural areas, such a policy is a prescription for deepening poverty.

Only now have some governments, encouraged by the U.S. and Western Europe, acknowledged that farmers have to be given financial incentives to produce more. With the continent $200 billion in debt to the West, the lending nations have not hesitated to twist arms. The E.C. and the World Bank are currently withholding $250 million in development aid for Ethiopia until its leaders agree to raise artificially low prices for agricultural products and allow farmers to sell more of their products on the open market. "For humanitarian aid, there are no conditions," says an E.C. spokesman. "For structural aid, there are conditions."

In Ethiopia, says Jay F. Morris, deputy U.S. AID administrator, "the problem is fundamental. They are taking a bad ecological situation and making it worse. By forcing farmers who do grow more than they consume to sell to the state at prices below the cost of production, they are not providing the incentive to produce the maximum that the land, however poor, would yield." Ethiopia's food production now totals 6.8 million tons a year, with little prospect for future growth; Western experts say the country will require an estimated 2 million tons of imported food in 1990. It almost seems, says Morris with a sigh, that the Ethiopians are "determined to render themselves a perpetual beggar nation."

Meanwhile, the people of Ethiopia seem rich only in patience. As the sun climbs in the sky, those awaiting food donations outside Wukro quietly sit on their haunches. One man, Gebre Yohanes Haile, 50, has brought along his chief resource: his ox. His family is sick with hunger, and so only he and the animal made the journey. Thus he will receive just one ration: twelve kilos of wheat, two of beans and two of oil. He will sell his ox for $200, and then pay $150 for 100 kilos of grain, twice the usual cost. "We have food for today," Gebre says. "I don't know about tomorrow."

A dull roar rises from the crowd. Registration is over, and distribution has begun. Men in white shirts decorated with big red crosses dole out the rations. Elders load the 100-lb. bags onto their backs and scurry back to their village groups, shoving people out of the way as they go. As the grain is divided, the people smile. They laugh. Some even sing. They are happy. They have food.

"They won't be laughing in a couple of weeks' time," says an Ethiopian official with tears in his eyes. "Now they smile even on half rations because today they can exist." His gloomy prediction seems true. The road between Mekele and Wukro remains c

; losed most of the time. And nobody knows just when the next food convoy will come.

With reporting by Leonora Dodsworth/Rome, Scott MacLeod/Washington and James Wilde/Wukro