Case-Studies: South Wollo, Ethiopia
Famine
South Wollo is heavily populated and cultivated. Most of its
2.5 million people live in the Central Highlands, mostly because
they are free from sicknesses, especially malaria. It gets very
cold in winter nights and the frost also destroys crops, which puts
another limitation on the peoples' lives. Because of the increase
of the population, the land has been divided and subdivided and
farmers try to grow as much as they can on their tiny patch of
land. They grow wheat, and barley at higher altitudes. A local type
of grain called 'teff' is well-liked by the highlanders, but can
only be grown under the right conditions. Famines have occurred in
the area in 1962/3 and 1972-74, this was in the days of the
Emperor. Another world famous famine was in 1984/5, in which an
estimated one million people died in Wollo. Luckily famine has more
or less been avoided since then. However there are still the
problems of increasingly smaller farms, less tree cover, more
erosion and land exhaustion.
Facts
and Figures
From US
State Department
Land area:
1,100,000 sq. km
Population:
58 million
Annual growth Rate:
3%
Infant mortality rate:
112/1000
Literacy rate:
25%
Life expectancy:
Not Available
Government type:
Federal republic
Trade:
Exports - $783 million
Imports - $1.65 billion
Per capita income:
$110
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There are barely forests left in Wollo. In fact,
wood is so scarce that the penalty for stealing it is damnation
from the church. Forest covers only about 1% of Wollo's land area
and just 3% in Ethiopia as a whole. The unreliable 'Belg', a series
of small rain showers, is depended on by the farmers between
February and April. Unfortunately it failed to rain the past few
years and therefore, the farmers must plant later in July, where
they face the likelihood that their crops will freeze in October or
November before harvesting. Also, farmers lost about 50,000
livestock in 1999 as a result of starvation, as there was no rain
to renew their grazing. A big famine could be avoided by a rush of
food aid that year, although several hundred people did die. Each
year hundreds of thousands of people require some food assistance
and the figures grow each year. In the year 2000, about 785,000
South Wolloyes are suspected to need food aid.
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The government supports a threefold strategy of improving food
aid, increasing agricultural inputs, and diversification through
agro-industry. Food aid systems have improved, but they are
dependent on donor head offices. Nevertheless, peasants complain
that with bad harvests they can't pay back the loans for fertilizer
and seeds without further impoverishing themselves. Critics say
that the land division results in plots too small for a household
to survive on, the re-divisions of land mean peasants feel insecure
about keeping their plot so they don't invest as much in it, and
that there is an artificial block to migration because every one
wants to hold onto their postage stamp patch of land because it's
all they have, and they lose it without compensation if they
leave.
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