The bones of emaciated cattle catch the sharp noon sun, casting shadows across their hides as they inch towards an old woman named Shitaye*. Two animals are all that are left of the small herd her family once relied on.
Rain has finally brought some new green blades to the pastures on this broad lowland and as the cows inhale them hungrily Shitaye talks about her own hunger — months-long, paralysing and intractable.
Drought killed the harvest she had hoped to reap in June. Since January, family meals have consisted of a bit of corn and some coffee in the morning, with nothing else for the rest of the day. Some days there has been no food at all.
Shitaye, a widow and grandmother of 10, says the crisis is worse than the hunger that killed about a million people in Ethiopia in 1984. Now they can’t even sell their belongings in the market to buy food because grain prices have climbed far out of their reach.
In late June a quintal of corn was selling for 600 birr (or R468) and teff, from which injera bread is made, had spiraled up to 1 100 birr, or R858, for the same volume — prices that are three times higher than usual.
In the West Arsi zone of central Ethiopia the combination of failed rains, chronic poverty and a wild spike in food prices has left 320 000 people needing relief. Now the Ethiopian government says4,6-million people nationwide — up from 2,2-million earlier this year — need emergency assistance and 75 000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition.
Aid workers report that in northern parts of the country’s Somali region, where most people are herders, rain has not fallen in two years. In the south, in Oromia’s Borena zone, the 45 days of rain that normally replenish the area between March and May dwindled to 15 last year and just five this year. Pasturelands are parched and fields too dry to produce staple foods. The government says 90% of people in the district need food assistance.
In West Arsi food for immediate consumption and seeds for planting will be essential to avoid an even deeper crisis next year.
On a recent Wednesday morning a large crowd of people gathers outside the government offices in West Arsi’s Shalla district where, according to government figures, 55 598 people have been identified as needy, but only 10 000 can be helped. In this crisis distinctions based on need have begun to blur.
A middle-aged man shouts that local officials promised two weeks ago to support the people with wheat, oil and corn, but so far he has received nothing. The crowd has been waiting for four days and the only answer is that they should wait some more. Recently someone died waiting.
Others have been filling their stomachs with a leafy weed that has sprung up since the rains came. But the greens — boiled in water and salted — have made some of their children sick with diarrhoea.
A short distance away mothers rest on a long line of benches under the shade of a giant tree at the Shalla health centre. This is a feeding centre to which some of the weakest children come for a week’s supply of Plumpy Nut — a nutrient-packed food supplement for malnourished children. Not all hungry children qualify for the supplement. One of them is the 11-month-old son of a single mother: he is her only child and — desperate to get him some more food — she offers to give him away to an aid worker.
When asked about solutions to these problems, government officials tick off lists of broad ideas. In Dire some promote natural resource management and encourage the diversification of livestock herds so that people are not so dependent on cattle and can learn to work with more drought-resistant animals, such as goats and camels.
There used to be a drought once every eight years, giving communities time to recover in between. But since 2000 there have been five droughts.
To help herders in the short term, Oxfam and its local partner, the Gayo Pastoralist Development Initiative, launched a programme to provide veterinary services for about 400 000 animals in four districts in the Borena Zone — animals on which people depend for milk, meat and income. If they are treated for internal and external parasites herds stand a better chance of remaining healthy during hard times. For poor herders with few resources to spare, the treatments, which cost about 2 birr (R1,50) per animal, are not something they would be able to afford on their own.
One herder, named Dida*, says 30 of his cows, 50 goats and a camel died before the vaccination programme. ”When the cattle are good and give milk, we drink milk any time,” he says. But he hasn’t seen that kind of sustenance in months. ”The cattle are not giving milk. The situation is very bad.”
In a West Arsi community, a half a day’s drive north, a cereal bank is providing some people with a cushion against these bad times. It allows villagers to pool and save their hard-won harvests for a while, allowing them to get better prices and then re-invest some of the extra cash they earn back into the community.
Now in its third year, the cereal bank is one of 10 constructed with the help of the Centre for Development Initiatives. The cereal bank earned its 167 members a combined profit of 70 000 birr (R54 627) this year, a small fortune in this region. The bank still has 300 quintals of corn (about 30 000kg) stored in sacks heaped almost to the ceiling — a buffer against the hunger now stalking many members of the community.
But with hunger so rampant the stored grain also presents the bank with a moral dilemma: do members restrict its use to themselves or share it with the broader local community? ”We are confused,” admits the store keeper, ”and fearful about the future.”
The green that now blankets part of the zone holds promise. To outsiders it may even appear that the troubles are over here. But Shitaye, the old woman with two cows, and her neighbours know otherwise.
They are hungry. The next harvest is a long way off. ”We’re wondering if we’ll survive until September,” says a man sitting near Shitaye.
* Not their real names
Coco McCabe is a humanitarian writer for Oxfam America