Hungry and Frightened: Famine in Ethiopia 2016

[polly7]

by Graham Peebles / April 29th, 2016

Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are once again at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish.

According to a statement issued by the World Food Programme (WFP) on February 6th, over 10 million of the most vulnerable require urgent humanitarian assistance. This figure was published in the Joint Government and Humanitarian Partners’ Document (HRD) in December last year, and does not take into account the seven and a half million people who annually receive cash or food from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), (established in 2005 to enable, “the rural poor facing chronic food insecurity to resist shocks, create assets and become food self- sufficient”), taking the total in need of humanitarian food aid to almost 18 million.

The WFP explains that the level of humanitarian need in Ethiopia has “tripled since early 2015…caused by successive harvest failures and widespread livestock deaths. Acute malnutrition has risen sharply, and one quarter of Ethiopia’s districts are now officially classified as facing a nutrition crisis.” With a shortage of food, families are forced to make children drop out of school to take up into menial jobs to survive; such children, lacking a decent education, are unable to find well-paid jobs in adulthood in order to feed their own children properly, and so the spiral of exclusion, poverty and deprivation continues.

Land grabbing and hunger

Since 2008 the EPRDF government has been leasing huge amounts of fertile agricultural land to so-called “foreign investors’’: international corporations, domestic agents, fund managers, and nations anxious to secure their own future food security.

Detailed research by the OI in 2011 estimated that “3,619,509ha of land have been transferred to investors, although the actual number may be higher.” Incentives to investors include exemption from import taxes, income taxes and custom duties as well as ‘easy access to credit’; the Ethiopian Development Bank will contribute up to 70% towards land costs – which are extremely cheap to begin with.

The need for sharing

It is the poor who die of hunger-related causes throughout the world; it is the poorest people in rural Ethiopia – who constitute some of the poorest people on Earth – who are currently at risk. Every day 35,000 children in the world die of starvation and its attendant causes, but we live in a world of plenty; there is no need for a single man, woman, or child – in Ethiopia or anywhere else – to die because they do not have enough food or water to survive. Oxfam reports that the world now “produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago. But close to a billion people go to sleep hungry every night.” And they all live, more or less, in seven countries: India, China, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

Food, like water, shelter, access to education and health-care is a human right, and is enshrined as such in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like all natural resources it should be shared equitably amongst the people of the world, so that nobody, anywhere – specifically the famine-affected regions of Ethiopia, where so many are once again in dire need – experiences food-insecurity and dies of hunger.

Full article: http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/04/hungry-and-frightened-famine-in-ethiopia-2016/

[Turbineguy]

1. We keep shooting the wrong people.