The green hunger hits Ethiopia’s farmers

THEY call it the green hunger, the deceiving sight of crops in the ground but no food to eat.

Ayano Roba has been living with this deceit for months. When the April rains failed, the 40-year-old father of six waited with increasing anxiety to plant his annual crop of maize (corn) and haricot beans.

He finally got his chance in June, two months late, and the young crops enjoyed some early growth but by then the family’s meagre stores of food and cash was badly depleted.

Now Ayano is waiting again, praying each day that the latest round of delayed rains continue so that the grains will swell in readiness for harvesting in November. It is a long wait for a family who right now should have fresh yellow cobs of corn on their plate. In the meantime, they are going hungry, their meals halved and their diet relying heavily on the unripe haricot beans, plucked while still green and weak in taste and nutrition.

To make matters worse, haricot is their cash crop. By eating it they are using up their only source of cash income for the year so if there is not consistent rain to guarantee the maize harvest, they will have nothing to eat and nothing to buy food with.

The strain on Ayano’s face is clear. His children, three boys and three girls aged three to 13, are thin, their skin is dry and their eyes run.

He says many of the children of the 250 households in Abne village are suffering similarly but, technically speaking, they are not in a drought region so there is no government assistance and charities are busy dealing with emergency cases in more severely affected parts of the country.

Like his neighbours, Ayano is a traditional farmer, not yet benefiting from development aid and relying entirely on rain for watering his crops.

The nearest year-round water source is Ziway Lake 7km away and it is chore enough to walk there each day to collect drinking water. From his mud hut home he points to the tantalising sight of a municipal reservoir built 3km away to serve the needs of Ziway town.

“We have no access to it,” he says through an interpreter. “We need a proper irrigation system, but for now we hope for more rain. It must rain at least one day each week until November or things will be very bad.”

The effects of the food shortage are also felt at Butajira Hospital, an hour’s drive away. The hospital, established in 2001 with the help of funding from the Self Help development agency, sees about 400 children a year at its therapeutic feeding centre but numbers are up this year.

Five-year-old Adem Huru arrived at the hospital yesterday, listless, underweight and with badly swollen feet.

His is the “kwashkwor” form of malnutrition, hospital manager, Ayele Berhanu, explains — so familiar are the staff with malnutrition that it gets different names, kwashkwor meaning mainly carbohydrate deficient.

It’s not the most serious form and with intensive feeding on nutrient rich plumpynut, Adem should be home in five days with instructions to his parents on how to feed him better.

His father, Huru Shikur, says apologetically that the boy, like his older siblings, eats mainly maize but Ayele won’t hear of apologies.

“They have some vegetables growing that they should feed the children, but they are for selling to make cash. Many families keep their vegetables to sell so they have money to buy food if their harvest is poor. It means they don’t get good nutrition, but they think it’s better than to risk having nothing. It’s a choice they have to make.”

* Caroline O’Doherty is travelling in Ethiopia with Self Help Africa. See www.selfhelpafrica.com