by Stefan Gates
Gebru and Yalezmer
The next day I arrive in a remote village to stay with Gebru Abera and his wife Yalezmer who live in a rural Mekele village and grow their own food. Most Ethiopians are subsistence farmers who raise a few animals or plant staple crops and sometimes sell anything that's left over after they've fed their families. Gebru is famous around these parts for staying put in the village in 1984. 'I stayed here to look after our last cows while my wife and children left for the camp to look for food.' It's a measure of how important cattle are that he took such an extreme risk. Gebru made it through, although they've never managed to restore their herd and they constantly struggle to make ends meet.
I've brought the family a gift of coffee and sugar, and Mama Yalezmer insists on using it to perform the traditional elaborate two-hour-long Ethiopian coffee ceremony. The beans are roasted over a charcoal stove, filling the house with a delicious acrid-sweet smell. At the same time, Mama throws a handful of incense on the charcoal, which belches thickly-scented smoke. 'It's to clear the flies,' she says, although with my eyes streaming, I'm not sure if I don't prefer the flies.
Three separate rounds of coffee are made from one handful of beans, and before we taste it, Gebru intones a prayer for us. The coffee, when I finally get to taste it, is fantastic: deeper, richer and fresher than any coffee I have ever tasted in my life. Extensive slurping is expected, and I enthusiastically oblige, to Gebru's amusement. He's enormously proud of his house – it's made of rocks and mud, but it's beautiful, with benches built into the walls, ft could be a rustic romantic hideaway straight out of Vogue, if it wasn't for the cloud of flies. Gebru points to a small room hanging up high. 'That's my food store,' he says. 'I had to put it up there so the rats stopped eating everything. It's empty now.'
Gebru takes me on a long walk to the highest point in the village, from where we can see 40 or 50 km of green countryside stretching out beneath us. He tells me about the big droughts: 'This is all like sand – all our crops fail and there's nothing for the cattle to eat. So many of my friends and family in the village have died. But then sometimes the rains come in floods, and the crops are all ruined again.'
'Why do you think that Ethiopia still needs so much aid?'
'Because people are lazy.'
Wow! I wasn't expecting that one. But Gebru is adamant. 'People get aid, and they don't have to work their fields, so they sit and do nothing. And the next year, when the aid doesn't come, they complain and blame the government.'
On the way back to the village Gebru shows me a large, swampy pond. 'This was built by the villagers as part of the government's Productive Safety Net Programme [whereby the needy work on government projects in return for food or money]. It's pointless – nobody wanted it, nobody uses it, it's a breeding ground for mosquitoes and as soon as there's a drought it dries out anyway. What a waste of time! The problems for farmers like me are drought, flooding and aid. We are all farmers in Ethiopia, and when the aid arrives, I can't sell my spare food – who would pay for my grain when people are given it for free? And when there's a good harvest, the price drops and I don't earn enough money to buy seed to plant for the next year.'
One of the big problems in Ethiopia is the lack of storage facilities for grain, so even if there is a good harvest, the food can't be put away for the following year, and the market fluctuates wildly.
Back at her house, Yalezmer refuses to let me walk off around the rest of the village without eating some food, so she shows me how to cook injera – a sort of pancake that has the texture of tripe crossed with crumpets, and a heady yeasty flavour. If Ethiopia has a national dish, it's injera – every family has a bucket of the watery dough fermenting at the back of their hut ready to be cooked. Yalezmer's is the popular traditional version made from a tiny indigenous Ethiopian grain called tef, mixed with water and left to brew. She whips off a lid made of dried cow dung and shows me her hotplate made from dried mud, under which she has stoked a ferocious fire. She takes a cup and pours the injera mixture in a spiral to make a beautifully even pancake. The heat bubbles through the mixture, creating the tripe texture, and after a couple of minutes with the lid on, it's done.
Now it's my turn. I try to pour the mixture but my spiral becomes a cack-handed splodge, thick in places and thin in others. Yalezmer raises an eyebrow, but remembers that I'm a guest, so declares my efforts 'wonderful'. Outside the door, her beautiful daughters are pissing themselves with laughter. I put the lid on and my injera cooks, the thin bits swiftly burning and the thick bits remaining wet and doughy. I apologize and slide the pancake off, whereupon it boils my skin and I jump up with a yelp. We both try a little, and, despite its unconventional shape, it tastes great. I sit down to eat with the whole family, plus a few neighbours who have wandered in to take a look. We eat yoghurt and chilli powder with the injera, which turns out to be a startlingly good mop for sauces.
Just one warning: don't put your fingers in your mouth. It's extremely rude to do this in Ethiopia – you are inevitably manhandling a communal blanket of injera so if you lick your fingers, everyone else is liable to get a taste of your spit. It's agony for me because I love licking food off my fingers and right now my fingers are covered in yoghurt so the temptation is strong. I catch myself licking them unawares even' now and then, to disappointed looks from Mama.
I take a wander around the village. It's a ramshackle and crumbling collection of mud huts and scrubland surrounded by fields, and most of the kids are half-naked or in rags, and they are all strangely small (around half of children in Ethiopia are stunted).
I speak to some of the other families and a whole new set of problems becomes apparent: land and population. Zoferi Woldetensae shows me his hut and small yard. 'Look at me,' he says, plucking at his shredded shirt. 'Do I look like a rich man? I have no land and only five goats. I have nothing to rely on and nobody to help me. Sometimes I get work on the Safety Net Programme and that keeps me alive.'
The problem is this: the Ethiopian population is growing at a phenomenal rate, according to UN figures, and at 77 million it's already double what it was during the '84 famines. Well, that makes it much clearer – no wonder there's such a problem in Ethiopia. The resulting pressure on land here is immense, with the distribution of land amongst extended families creating smaller and smaller plots.
Zoferi's friend Asseba Addis is in more difficulty: 'I can't work because I have a bad leg, so I don't even get aid. A few years ago I agreed to join a relocation programme and the government took many of us to a new area and gave us land.'
The Ethiopian government decided to move 2.2 million people living on barren land to more fertile lowland areas around the country. Resettlement has an inauspicious history here: Haile Selassie tried it in 1974, but many died and others fled the country. Many in the aid community see the idea as badly planned, poorly executed and problematic, and they refuse to contribute to the programme.
Asseba's experience seems to bear this out: 'We got a government grant and cleared the land and made it into a farm, but we started to get ill with malaria. And then, when the farm was finally running, we were kicked off by a man who said the land was his. The courts agreed, and we had to come back here, where we have nothing, and now the government want their money back.' He is terribly bitter about the whole experience, and there seems to be nothing he can do about it.
The village is dirt poor, and I ask how many of the fields belong to Zoferi. 'None,' Asseba replies. 'The priest owns all of this.' And as if by magic, the priest appears – a tall and angry man sporting what looks like a woollen blanket on his head. He yells at Zoferi to keep the goats out of his field.
Before we leave I ask Gebru and Yalezmer what they think about the millennium celebrations. 'Great stuff,' they say. 'Just what Ethiopia needs – a way to look forward to a wonderful future.' I ask if they resent the fact that tens of millions of dollars are to be spent on the celebrations, but they look at me as if I'm mad: 'Sounds wonderful. I hope you have a grea
t time. It is such an auspicious event for our beautiful country.'
Addis again
After losing a whole day to Ethiopian Airlines, we are back on track to travel 800 km south to Addis Ababa. I'm beginning to appreciate being here a little more now. To be honest, I'm very much on probation here in Ethiopia. When we applied for our visas and filming permits we were told that on no account were we to mention the famines. Now, I can understand a country wanting to look to a bright future rather than a miserable past, but to skip over the greatest food crisis of recent times in a food and current affairs programme sounds a little unreasonable. In fact, it sounds ridiculous.
However, to show willing, we take a look at the two wealthiest bits of the capital: the airport and the Sheraton Hotel. Unlike almost everything else in Africa – such as cars, books, houses, banks – which tend to look about 50 years old, the airport is very new and sparkly. It's also quite controversial, having displaced a slum of 10,000 residents, and cost a reported $123 million to build. It's like a small Stansted, and it has attracted widespread criticism as a vanity project. I'm not so sure that it's as simple as that. I hate to sound like a capitalism apologist, but I think that vanity projects sometimes have an inordinate impression on a poor country's diaspora and investors, who for better or worse like to see that money can be spent and big projects can be realized.
And I suspect that totems as idiotic as this can bring money into a country, and that this encourages more investment. OK, $123 million is a lot of money, but how much should an international airport cost to build in a country desperate for growth? Is $100 million all right? Fifty million? While we were there the airport was pretty busy (presumably employing hundreds of people and bringing in visitors and their cash). Could $123 million have been spent by the WFP feeding millions of people? Maybe. Would that have made a long-term improvement to Ethiopia? Well, it hasn't so far.
Next, we take a look at the palatial Addis Ababa Sheraton where, as journalists never fail to point out, rooms cost up to $5,000 a night (although they skip over the fact that you can also get one for $280). I'm sure UN employees love this place, as do foreign dignitaries. In fact, I know that big BBC news correspondents are quite fond of it too, even as they intone to the camera about the fat cats that frequent it (sadly, little ones like me don't get to stay there, although I manage to get a couple of nights in the Hilton – nice lobby, no water in the rooms – to offset the grimmer nights out in the villages). The opulence of this place makes me feel a bit grubby, so I leave, but again I suspect that these places bring employment for hundreds of people, and draw visiting richos to stay and spend their cash in the country.
The World Food Programme
The World Food Programme office in Addis Ababa is a large and relatively shiny building, surrounded by lots of their big white Land Cruisers. I head off south, following one of the Land Cruisers on the first leg of a four-day trip, another 800 km south, to deliver food aid. First, we visit the pick-up point, and this is where my sympathetic view of the World Food Programme starts to falter. About 12 WFP officials stand around watching us film a small truck being loaded by around 20 porters. It's all a bit weird, a rather cheesy PR display. Perhaps we are complicit in this: we asked if we could film the food being loaded, but I didn't realize it was being set up especially for me, or that so many people really needed to watch.
Then events take a funny turn: I tell Melese, the assistant press officer for the WFP, that I'd like to ask him about aid, and he goes nuts. 'That isn't what we had arranged. That was never agreed.' Well, who is going to explain to us what's going on? I ask. 'I don't know. That was not the understanding. I don't have the authority.'
This is very odd. 'Melese, you are a press officer – surely, if there's anyone who can talk to the press, it's you?'
'No, I can't. That wasn't the understanding.'
I suddenly develop a dislike for this man. I am planning to spend four days on a food distribution trip, and if the WFP can't tell me what's going on, what food aid is and what its pitfalls are, I've wasted a lot of the BBC's time and money. And, more to the point, the WFP is going to come across as a strange, paranoid and shabby organization. We call the head of press, who says, 'We never agreed to an interview.' What? What is wrong with these people? They're the effing World Food Programme, not the Chinese Communist Party. What could they possibly have to hide? The head of press says she'll think about it (what is there to think about?), so we have no choice but to push on, following our lone food truck and the irritating Melese south.
Aid is a tricky thing. There's no doubt that emergency aid measures saved millions of lives in 1984, but as the aid agencies say, 'If you see an airlift, somebody's screwed up.' And this opens up a whole world of complications. Aid can also be a destructive force, ruining the long-term ability of a country to feed itself and fracturing the self-determination and self-sufficiency of a country when delivered badly. And the aid world is a multi-billion-dollar industry where big salaries can be earned and life can be very good.
The WFP gets a lot of bad press – in the gloriously angry book Lords of Poverty by Graham Handcock, for example, which rails at the fat cats, failed projects, unaccountability and bureaucratic inefficiency of the UN and the big NGOs. I don't know if this is fair or not: I've met a fair amount of decent World Food Programme people and I always think that the phrase 'fat cat' is a signpost of lazy journalism. Are these people fat? Bad? Wealthy? Perhaps they are just wealthier than most journalists?
Whatever the definition, if I'm honest, you'd probably have to pay me pretty decently to run a food distribution project thousands of miles from my family, in a poor, dangerous and difficult region, with no home comforts. And yes, you'd probably have to give me one of those big comfy white 4x4 cars with air con so in case I get stuck out after dark. I can rough it like anyone else for a few weeks, and I can offer my time, love and sympathy for a while. But there are relatively few people (wonderful though they are) who are in a position to give up their lives to voluntary work. So although I'm sure there are inefficiencies and bad people around, I'm generally glad that my money goes to pay people to work for the UN. But this is Ethiopia – the biggest aid story in the world. I wonder if this is where all my understanding and reasonable attitude falls apart.
As we drive, I mull on the issues. The WFP in Ethiopia gets most of its donations from the USA – $504 million ('over recent years to end of January 2007'). However, that's actually a little misleading because the USA has to, by law, spend all that money on buying goods from US agribusiness and shipping them on US-owned transport, whereupon the recipient either distributes the (now very expensive) food or flogs it to get cash for its projects. Weird, huh? It's all good news for US farmers, shipping companies and the politicians who get their cash and votes. But, as I've seen over and over again on my travels, dropping food into a market destroys farmers' livelihoods and over a couple of seasons makes communities less able to support themselves.
In 2004 the US government provided $500 million of food aid, but only $4 million of long-term development aid. Something's wrong there. It's so damaging that CARE International, one of the big aid groups here, took the extraordinary step of rejecting a donation of $45 million this year – and a rejection like that is a big deal for an NGO. The EU abandoned food aid in kind in 1999, and all but 2 per cent now goes in cash.
We pass through the Great African Rift Valley and watch the landscape change from green and lush to rocky and barren. We are travelling on Ethiopia's main north-south road – their Ml, if you will. It is a decent, straight, two-lane road that rolls over hills and past lakes, although away from the city the traffic is minimal – there's only one vehicle every 15 minutes or so. We pass the huge central lakes – beside one is an enormous flower-growing greenhouse – probably about 1.5 km square. Tens of thousands work in the flower industry, but there have been concerns about working conditions, including contact with pesticides and ecological damage. Workers earn about 40p a day, b
ut at least they have a job. And the industry is growing fast: some say that flowers may soon rival coffee as an export crop.
We arrive at the food distribution centre in Yalebo a couple of days later. Around 100 women have been selected from the local community to receive aid because their children are badly malnourished. Before they are given anything, though, they have to sit through a nutrition talk. I sit in the middle of them and chat to a few women at random. Our WFP officials get extremely agitated about this. They have chosen an aid recipient for us to talk to, and they are worried that I will get the wrong message if I just talk to anyone willy-nilly. The woman I sit next to proves their point. She says, 'I don't know why they suddenly told me to come here – I've never been before. I'm not going to turn down free food. I don't know why they suddenly decided to do this.' Oh dear.
I meet Fate Gilo, another aid recipient, who invites us to her hut. Her village is on a barren hillside, and is nothing more than a scattering of temporary-looking huts. Fate shares two tiny huts with her husband and eight children. The huts are extraordinary tiny structures the shape and size of a VW Beetle, made of sticks bent over for strength, and covered in a patchwork of cardboard boxes and bits of plastic. She has brought home 25 kg of WFP flour and 3 litres of oil. Normally it takes her two hours to carry this load home, but today some English bloke has offered her a lift in his car, and she's not going to turn that down.
Faté has no land and no cattle. She does, however, have a donkey, and she uses it to carry out a job right at the bottom of the employment heap: collecting firewood. 'When you have nothing else, you can earn money by foraging in the fields for dead wood to sell.' She's bitterly angry that it's her only lifeline. It's exhausting, backbreaking work, and as we travel around the south we see thousands upon thousands of people doing it because there's simply nothing else. Most people – from tiny children to the elderly – walk with huge bundles balanced on their heads and in their arms. Fate is, in relative terms, extremely lucky to have a donkey to help her, and her income from firewood is much higher than most – 50p per day.
