ETHIOPIA: Regional Humanitarian Coordinator Drought team

ADDIS ABABA, 24 November (IRIN) - A major food crisis in the Horn of Africa this year led to the establishment of a special regional UN team based in Ethiopia, led by UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator, Manuel da Silva. At the epicentre of the crisis was Gode, in the Ogaden, southeastern Ethiopia, where death rates of people and livestock rose alarmingly in March and April. An international humanitarian intervention was later commended for preventing a full-scale famine, but locally, people complained that the operation did not reach out as far and as fast as it should have.

Mark Bidder, deputy-coordinator of the Ethiopian Emergency Unit and a member of the team, has worked with operations in the Ogaden since 1991. He talked to IRIN about the disaster in the Ogaden.

QUESTION: In the Somali Region, people say they suffered a famine, but the international aid agencies say it was a food crisis. Was it a famine, or not?

ANSWER: There is no doubt that the situation in the Ogaden this year was a major crisis. We have tended to avoid the term "famine" simply because of the connotations that term has in Ethiopia - mass movements of people, mass starvation, mass death. But it was certainly extremely acute, and certainly famine conditions in the traditional sense did exist in certain areas of the Ogaden, particularly around Gode and the Shebelle River, Imi, and other areas in the Somali Region (Somali Region, southeastern Ethiopia). It had the potential for becoming more widespread. Thankfully, because of the more or less favourable rains later in the year plus a pretty effective relief operation, the situation was contained. But it remains very difficult, the people are extremely vulnerable - we have to work at avoiding slipping into the same kind of crisis again.

Q: Locally, the emphasis was on how the crisis affected the livestock. It was seen as a "livestock famine" - why?

A: That is the issue because there, people's lives depend on animals. It is the basis of the local economy. It is what underpins food security in the area for the bulk of people. A large number of animals died, particularly among the cattle. Figures are quoted of up to 50 percent and more of cattle - in particular areas - which died in the middle of the year. That's a major disaster for many people... it'll take many years for them to recover because the livestock herds themselves will take many years to get back to the same numbers.

Q: Doesn't that have big implications for the recovery cycle, especially with the newly imposed Rift Valley fever ban on livestock export from the Gulf States?

A: Absolutely. A month or two ago we were becoming quite optimistic - the rains had been good, grazing was recovering, milk production was rising again, and we had hopes the economy would stabilise and improve over the coming year. The announcement of this ban of livestock export, first by Saudi Arabia, is a major blow. Its going to be extremely serious for many parts of the Somali Region. It will set us back years, potentially. We would equate it with another failure of rains, quite frankly.

Q: Donors respond to an obvious emergency - like a major food shortage - but what response can you hope to get for this next crisis?

A: It's true. We are in something of a quandary right now as to how to tackle this particular development. One thing we can do is to continue to provide some kind of safety net for people in the area. So it will be necessary to continue to provide food assistance, and provide health and medical support and to try to improve water supplies. Just to basically sustain people in the situation they are in. But for the longer term? The answer to this particular problem is difficult to know. Perhaps the obvious answer is the development of alternative markets and diversification of the local economy. But that takes a long time.

Q: The Ogaden is particularly under-developed, and cycles of disaster and recovery are continuous. Does that mean humanitarian operations have failed?

A: Cycles of disaster and recovery are part of life in these marginal pastoralist areas, that's for sure. The rainfall has always been unreliable, patchy - but the pastoral way of life is designed to cope with that. People are mobile, they move with their animals to where the rains have been favourable, where the grazing is good. But things are changing. Populations are increasing, mobility of people is decreasing, they are becoming more vulnerable to rain failure. For the future, how to tackle it? It is a difficult challenge, and it is one the humanitarian community is trying to grapple with. It's one of the reasons the UN Secretary-General formed this high-level task force multi-agency, multi-sectoral to look at the issue on a larger scale - to see if there is something that can be done to address some of the underlying problems of this vulnerability. Some believe the only way forward is diversification of the economy, looking for alternative ways of making a living, looking at the potential for agriculture in the area. There certainly is potential for agriculture along the Shebelle River , for small-scale and large-scale irrigation. But the infrastructure of these areas has to be improved. They are very remote, very isolated areas, very few good roads. Telecommunications remain very poor. All these need to be addressed to integrate the peripheral areas into the mainstream economy of the country.

Q: Do you think the Somali Region gets the resources it deserves?

A: I don't think it has, quite frankly. And thats one of the reasons we've been through these cycles the last ten years. Certainly more needs to be done. But naturally governments and donors tend to invest their money where they will see an immediate return - where administrations are strong, where infrastructure is strong, where they can actually see some progress. This has always been difficult in these isolated, sometimes insecure, marginal, peripheral areas.