  
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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