In the Danger Zone (11 page)

• • • • •

Cameroon has a complex story, but my next destination has a simple history writ large. Twenty-five years ago the Ethiopian famines were, quite simply, the biggest food event of my lifetime. A grand-scale tale of human destruction, a story of global guilt, global redemption and back to global guilt again. I am terrified at the idea of going there, of trying to do justice to the gravity of the subject, and of trying to understand the human impact of such horror. Is it really appropriate to sit down for lunch with someone who's lived through
a famine?

POPULATION:
77 million

PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN
$2
A DAY:
78%

UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX:
170/177

CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION:
130/163

GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA:
$177 (176/179)

FOOD AID RECIPIENTS:
5.6 million

MALNUTRITION:
46% of the population

'Hello Addis ABABA!' [25,000 people cheer.]

'I've heard people say that Ethiopia is a poor country. Ethiopia isn't a poor country!' [25,000 people roar.]

'Because Ethiopians have LOVE in their hearts!' [25,000 people go wild.]

• • • • •

It's the last day of my trip to Ethiopia and I'm standing in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. In a few seconds it will be the dawn of the second millennium, which is weird because according to my calendar it's 11 September 2007, but Ethiopia is a little different. You see, back in the 16th century Pope Gregory brought in a new calendar that shifted the date of Jesus' birth (according to the old Julian calendar) by seven years, nine months and 11 days. The Ethiopians, being an orthodox bunch, and historically never particularly keen on embracing the modern world, decided to ignore Greg and stick with what they had. After all, who wants to go around replacing the stationery and resetting the video recorder?

And this extraordinary place is a vast warehouse built especially for a party in the centre of Addis Ababa. A warehouse party might not sound extraordinary, but this one has been financed to the tune of $10 million (plus whatever else the government has added – rumoured to be another $10 million) by Ethiopian-Saudi billionaire Sheikh al-Amoudi, and it's crammed with 25,000 people who've paid around $160 a ticket to be there. It seems a little snide to mention that the average Ethiopian annual income is only $177, but I'm currently feeling a little . . . conflicted. And the big shocker is that this warehouse is temporary, to be dismantled in a few months' time to make way for another building project.

I don't want to piss on anyone's millennium parade here, but $10 million is a lot of money, and when you're in one of the poorest countries on the planet, you can't expect to shell out that kind of cash on a warehouse, some nibbles, beer and a half-decent band and not get me asking a few difficult questions.

But there's no time for that now: the bloke up on the stage is only Will.i.am of the popular beat combo the Black-Eyed Peas! Hoh yes! And he's counting us down to the Ethiopian millennium and giving up the love, and there are 25,000 of us down here who've cast our reservations aside to party like it's 1999, and hey, if there's one thing Ethiopia needs, it's a thick, meaty slice of optimism to get the country back on its feet. So we all shout: Five! Four! Three! Two! One. . .

Mekele. Two Weeks Earlier

The flies. No one warned me about the flies. Persistent, fizzing, ticklish, swarming, disgusting. They crawl over my face, my eyes, lips, ears and hair. I spend the first couple of hours angrily swatting them away, but my skin slowly gets used to the sensation, and I eventually give up and let them wander over me, more irritated by my own swatting than their tickling.

I'm in Mekele in northern Ethiopia, one of the notorious dustbowl fields of death in 1984 where over I million people died. The names Korem, Bati and Mekele have had a diabolical, holocaustic resonance for me ever since I saw the famous footage of the Ethiopian famines on BBC news. These were the three worst camps where Michael Buerk uncovered a horrific scene of mass starvation and aid workers tearing their hair out with nothing to feed millions of desperate people and few medicines available to treat any who had enough strength to make them worth saving.

But from the ashes of death, misery and torment grew an unlikely hero: the world. Television made the world stand to attention, and for once the world proved ready and willing to take responsibility for an isolated nation it barely knew anything about, staging the biggest single peacetime mobilization of the international community in the 20th century. The outpouring of shock, sympathy and cash was remarkable because it came from individuals as much as from governments and politicians. Kids were mobilized, rock stars got recording, trucks were driven across the world, and people dug deeply into their pockets. Food started flying through the air, dropping in bundles from planes, thrown out of the back of trucks, and millions of people's lives were saved.

And yet . . . and yet. Despite the good that was done and the heartfelt sympathy and the vast donations, Ethiopia's luck didn't change. Despite everything Ethiopia is still a broken country today, and I can't understand why, in the 21st century, nearly 25 years after those great famines, there is such widespread chronic food insecurity, why there are twice as many hungry Ethiopians as there were in '84. Why today over 37 million Ethiopians are malnourished and why the country
still
needs $1.6 billion of aid every year.

There are legions of statistics declaiming Ethiopia's poverty and desperation, but the one that really sticks out is Ethiopia's ranking in the UN Human Development Index (I call it the Happiness Index): 170 out of 177. When you're that low down, being one place higher or lower means little. Basically, life in Ethiopia is, for most people, bloody awful.

So I'm in Mekele to find out what the hell is going on. I must admit that I was apprehensive at the idea of coming here, where the ghosts of a million starved souls haunt the land. But of course our nightmares invariably disappear when we confront them, and so it is with Mekele. This place is nothing like I imagined. There's no dustbowl, no bony lethargic cattle; instead the undulating hills and fields are a lush carpet of vegetation so green that it looks like Devon in spring, a sensation only strengthened by the light but persistent drizzle that's falling and the flowers that seem to blossom everywhere.

I had heard that this year the rains didn't fail, as they have so catastrophically five times in the last 20 years. But even so, I wasn't prepared for this place to look quite so fertile – not when the World Food Programme is expecting to feed 5,640,794 Ethiopians this year. But there's another side to this: my guide Dawit points out that it's green now because we're here just after the rains. Underneath that greenery lies poor, infertile soil. The reality is that much of Ethiopia suffers from soil erosion and soil exhaustion, unsustainable farming practices and wildly erratic rainfall that brings floods and droughts. Yet despite this, 85 per cent of the country's labour force works in agriculture, and they are often locked into a vicious cycle of poverty brought about by low-return agriculture causing food insecurity, and a consequent lack of access to the education that might break the cycle.

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.