40 years on
Joe Human looks back to 1985 and his experience of working during the famine in Ethiopia. His reflections are still relevant today.
A theory of deprivation
In 1981, three years before the Ethiopian Famine, Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, published his seminal work on famines: Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.
Sen argues that although there may be enough food available in total within a given area. it does not necessarily mean that everyone will be able to afford to buy it.
He went on to show that food crises are often caused by spikes in the price of food relative to wages, or by the collapse in the price of people’s assets. He said that the latter commonly accompanies famines because many people try to sell their assets at the same time to raise the money to buy food.
The truth of this I will shortly show you.
On the ground in Northern Ethiopia
I worked in the Ethiopian Famine at the start of Oxfam’s humanitarian response over the winter of 1984-85 when, under immense but belated international pressure, the Ethiopian Government could no longer ignore it. It was an experience which changed me forever. It also changed Oxfam forever, quadrupling its income over two years, from £12.3m in 82/83 to £51.5m in 84/85, and making the organisation resolve never to be caught out again by a disaster that the world – and to a degree, Oxfam – had ignored.
With a team of nurse nutritionists and water engineers, I was posted to the tiny township of Bora in a remote part of Wollo in the north of the country, where the famine was at its most intense. We were there to provide a feeding programme for severely malnourished children. To do this we decided we would not set up a large camp with the attendant risks of contagious diseases but would provide take-away dry rations as a supplement to government family provisions. However, for the most severely malnourished children we had to establish a small intensive (‘therapeutic’) feeding centre, as they would not have survived without it.
My job was to make sure food supplies were delivered on time and construction materials secured as the feeding centre expanded. I also had to report very regularly to Oxfam House on progress.
A market in a famine
Coming back now to Amartya Sen: soon after arriving in Bora, on Saturday 8th December 1984, I was walking with Tadesse, an Ethiopian member of our team, from the compound where we lived to our feeding centre. Our walk took us through the market square, where a market was in full swing. Dumbfounded by this – that there could be a market in a famine – I asked Tadesse if we could find out what was going on. ‘Sure,’ he said. So we stepped into the market.
Every ‘stall’ was laid out on the dusty ground. There were clothes sellers, a sandal seller, and a stall selling knives. Moving on, we stopped by a number of women selling ‘famine foods’ – wild fruits and berries, nuts and leaves. Then to my complete astonishment in the middle of the market we came across a row of half a dozen small grain ‘stalls’ with sorghum, fine grained teff and maize for sale: grain in a famine! This, of course, was what everyone so desperately needed but there was so little of it.
Stopping by the first seller sitting behind a small mound of dried maize, I asked where she got it from. ‘I live in the hills,’ she said. ‘We had a little rain last year which gave me a small crop.’ ‘How much is it?’ I asked. ‘Very expensive,’ she replied. ‘How expensive?’ I pressed. ‘A lot,’ she countered. For a time we went round in circles. But in the end we got there: it was five times the normal price at that time of year. Just along the line I watched a woman from one of the Afar pastoral communities down on the plains to see how much from the next seller she would buy – could afford to buy. Into her lap was poured a ‘baked bean’ tin full.
We then made our way down to the bottom end of the market to the livestock quarter – goats and sheep, donkeys, camels and cattle, all being sold by the pastoralist Afars to raise money to buy precious grain. It was crowded with animals – there was a glut. None looked scrawny, having fed on dried stalks from failed grain crops. But there were very few sales. The price we discovered later was five times below the normal price at that time of the year.
Sen’s theory in practice
So there you have it. The price of what everyone wanted – grain – was sky high because there was so little of it, and the assets – the livestock – which people were selling to buy that grain (but which few wanted) were almost worthless.
The following Wednesday, Tadesse and I walked again through the market where, midweek, there were few ‘stalls’.
But what caught our eyes were small groups of women selling – we could not believe it – their dismantled houses – the poles of their rafters, the brushwood of their walls and the thatch of their roofs. Having sold all their farm implements, their household utensils, their livestock, their jewellery, and eaten their seed corn, this was their last saleable asset: their very homes.
This image still brings me close to tears.
With 20 years teaching in Kenya, Papua New Guinea and England, 20 years working for Oxfam and another 15 Fairtrade campaigning, Joe Human has had a lifetime telling stories of people on the frontline.
Now his time is spent communicating the realities of life for people on the frontline of climate change.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Marissa Bortlik on Unsplash
Support images: kindly provided by Joe
Further information:
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/ethiopia-political-map.htm
Afar pastoralists in a changing rangeland environment https://www.celep.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Synopsis_diress_Phd_thesis.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Region
In the video presentation below, Joe looks back at his experiences during the Ethiopian famine
