[dehai-news] (independent.ie) Handouts no solution for famine-stricken Ethiopia


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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Sep 25 2008 - 21:00:57 EDT


Handouts no solution for famine-stricken Ethiopia

By Jason O'Brien in Huruta, Ethiopia
Thursday September 25 2008

IT'S just not the same Ethiopia. Despite the recent predictions that famine
in the south of the country will see five million people face starvation in
the coming months, despite the impact of rocketing world food prices and
inflation here soaring, despite the pleas on its behalf to foreign
countries not to cut aid to Africa in light of the global recession, it is
not the same old Ethiopia.

Slowly, but increasingly, the begging bowl is being seen as part of the
problem.

Dr Awole Mela, who works for an Irish-based self-help agency in the
country, says that more than 20 years after Bob Geldof brought the plight
of starving Ethiopians to the world stage, it is time the handouts ended,
to be replaced by hand ups.

"This country cannot survive by continually going to Europe and asking for
grain," the Africa director of Self Help Africa maintained. "That has
created for us a dependency culture and it is not what is needed.

"Bringing in 'relief food' cannot keep you more than three or four months,
but for how long are we going to continue getting it from Europe when there
is a drought? In Ethiopia you have to expect drought every time and any
time. The most important thing is to teach people to produce a variety of
their own crops, teach them how to deal with the droughts when they come.
Give them the right type of support to get started and they won't need any
support from anybody in the future."

That may sound somewhat Utopian to an Irish audience. Whenever we think of
Ethiopia, by and large, our stomachs rumble. We see little black babies
with distended bellies from a lack of food and fly-covered faces from a
lack of energy to swat them away. We hum the song about snow in Africa this
Christmas, and our hands very probably move towards our pockets, re-tracing
a journey made countless times before.

In Ethiopia itself, we imagine a scorched, dead countryside, akin to the
surface of the moon, and with just as little water.

But the reality this week in the Huruta region, about 165km (100 miles)
south east of Addis Ababa, could hardly provide a starker contrast.

Lush green fields, abundant with the local staple crop "teff" -- as well as
wheat and maize, onions, tomatoes and cabbage, banana and papaya, coffee
trees and sunflowers, cattle and goats -- surround the remote area for
miles, despite a relatively dry rainy season, which has just ended. Self
Help Africa has been running one of its nine Ethiopian programmes here for
a number of years, taking in an area of 100,000 acres and about 110,000
people. To the naked eye, it is a success. More so, to the ear.

Ato Shita Woldesadik, a 55-year-old father of 10, had spent more than 20
years farming his six acres in Kakarssa village, with little success
because of the notoriously erratic rainfall.

Dependent on the government for food to keep his family from starving for
an average of three or four months each year, he decided to change his
farming methods in 2006, despite his advancing years.

Self Help, which only employs Ethiopian natives and has been active here
since 1987, provided him with the knowledge of a number of agricultural
technologies -- including how to build a rudimentary holding sump for
water, dug into the ground, lined with cement and covered with thatch to
prevent evaporation -- through "contact" farmers in the locality it had
already helped.

It also gave him access to, and knowledge about, seeds for various
drought-resistant crops and crops that produce early. "With the surplus
wheat and teff I produced, I was able to send some of my children to
Arabian country to work," Ato Shita told the Irish Independent through an
interpreter. "And with the money they sent back I am able to send my seven
youngest children to school."

He calculates that he made approximately €1,750 extra last year, which is
a heady sum in a country where huge numbers of casual construction workers
on the sites in Addis Ababa take home less than €1 per day.

His success has been imitated by many others, with some of his neighbours
telling how they can now pay up to €4,000 to build "modern" houses, with
corrugated iron roofs.

In a country where up to 80pc of the people are reliant on agriculture for
their livelihood, the figures are noteworthy. But they should also be
noteworthy a little closer to home.

Last year, the Irish Government -- through the taxpayer -- gave €35m in
aid to Ethiopia, with millions pumped into the country through
non-government organisations like Goal and Self Help.

The notable aspect of the Self Help programme, however, is that the
beneficiaries get nothing for free. The seeds for the new varieties of
crops, for example, have to be paid for -- 25pc up front with the remainder
paid at the end of the help programme.

The farmers are given advice and encouragement to set up saving and credit
cooperatives. There is an emphasis on social services and on health,
especially HIV/AIDS prevention in a country where over five million are
estimated to have the disease. After five years, any input from Self Help
ends.

"These projects give people their dignity," Mr Awole said. "They want to
work, and they want to be a success, and they want their family and
neighbours to work and be a success."

Self Help, which, after its recent amalgamation with UK agency Harvest
Help, now operates in nine countries across the continent, believes that
Ethiopia can become an example to others of how it is possible to turn
things around.

And Ireland may yet have more of a role in helping Ethiopia than the
obvious markers of Sir Bob and donations for the starving.

"We're unique in terms of where we are from because of our relatively
recent famine and the conflict in the North," group CEO Ray Jordan said.
"We have effectively gone the full circle to end up as one of the
most-developed and successful countries in the world.

"It was the Irish people themselves that turned around the country. Okay,
we got assistance from the European Union, foreign direct investment and so
on, but it was the people who worked their way from being incredibly poor
to being well-educated and world beaters.

"It has to be exactly the same in the developing world. The local people
know exactly what their daily struggles are, and who are we to come in from
a top-down approach? We can support them though so that they can start
taking the small steps needed for change."

For more information, visit www.selfhelpafrica.com

- Jason O'Brien in Huruta, Ethiopia

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