allAfrica.com: Ethiopia: Two Months of Rain But Still Not Enough to Eat (Page 1 of 2)

In normal times, the weekly market in Badessa town, Damot Woyde district of Wolayita zone in Ethiopia's Southern Region, fills with fresh food as farmers and traders bring in crops from the surrounding hills.

Over the last few months, the main food sold in the market has been 'kocho', a strong-smelling, dough-like paste made from the processed roots and stems of enset, a member of the banana family of plants.

"Enset is the last food asset for most families in this region," Tadesse Boda, a local resident told IRIN in the market on 25 August. "Seeing it in the market in such quantities means there is no other food to eat."

Much of Wolayita suffered drought last year, followed by erratic rains that failed the 'belg' harvest of maize, millet, wheat, haricot bean and teff crops at a time when food prices were rising sharply.

Many have now pinned their hopes on rains in the area for the last two months, which turned the gardens of young maize, beans and wheat into verdant fields.

"I expect to harvest food that can last me at least six months," Wegari Beyene, a mother-of-three explained as she waited to receive supplementary food for her youngest child at Badessa distribution centre. "I own a half hectare of land."

One-year-old Abel Beyene had been on treatment for serious malnutrition for six weeks. "Once the food gets finished, I will sell firewood or work for someone to feed the children."

Like Wegari, many people facing food shortages in the Southern Region have limited coping mechanisms, such as participation in the Productive Safety Nets Programme (see sidebar), and borrowing food or money. Others sell livestock cheaply, temporarily migrate to towns and cities, eat seed reserves, take children out of school or resort to cheap, basic diets.

Safety nets

Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), launched in 2005 as part of the government's Food Security Programme and designed to mark a gradual shift from emergency relief towards development, has won widespread international praise as a social protection instrument.

Under the programme, chronically food-insecure people are given food, cash, or a combination of the two to help them bridge production deficits without having to sell their modest assets in order to eat.

PSNP beneficiaries engage in community work such as road construction. The disabled and the elderly receive direct transfers. One setback with cash transfers is that rising costs mean the payments buy less and less food.

Some 7.2 million people in Ethiopia currently benefit from the PSNP. "The big question is whether we have enough in our own economy to be able to finance [it]," Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently told Time Magazine. "We have not reached that stage yet."

"When you get people living on the edge, a shock like drought easily pushes them over," Louise Finan of the NGO Concern Worldwide in Ethiopia said. "Then it brings them into the cycle of not being able to pull themselves out of it."

Apart from the Southern Region, also called the SNNPR, several other areas of Ethiopia have equally suffered food shortages, say humanitarian workers. This is despite heavy rains in recent weeks.

The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC), for example, has revised its six-month emergency appeal to US$7.9 million to assist more than 76,000 people in Wolayita, while the Ethiopian Red Cross, which in May targeted 40,000 vulnerable people in Damot Pulasa, has added 36,000 more in neighbouring Damot Gale.

"Over the past two months the situation has worsened and living conditions have deteriorated. People have exhausted all their resources and are unable to feed themselves," Lorenzo Violante, IFRC's drought operations manager, said on 20 August.

Damot Gale and Damot Pulasa had more than 16,000 acutely malnourished children, of whom 1,614 were in intensive care in therapeutic centres.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Ethiopia, food security and malnutrition continue to affect people living in most of Ethiopia's drought affected regions.

The situation has, however, improved in some areas where the harvesting of green maize, teff and beans has started. Water is also more available in some areas due to recent main season 'kiremt' rainfall, OCHA said in a 25 August report.

The government admits food is short, but insists the situation is not out of control. "We have pockets of severe malnutrition in some districts in the south and an emergency situation in the Somali region," Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told TIME magazine in an interview published on 18 August.

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