Chris Herlinger, a freelance journalist and aid worker with Church World Service, writes another in a series of articles from his recent trip to the Horn of Africa to cover the food crisis. In this piece, published in the Huffington Post, he writes from Ethiopia about continued concern that inadequate rainifall will cause future poor harvest, continuing the cycle of hunger.
Near Adigrat, Ethiopia — In many ways, the denuded, desiccated area near the Ethiopian-Eretria border fits the popular image of what a drought and concomitant food crisis looks like.
At a water point constructed with support by the local Roman Catholic archdiocese, Abebo Berhe filled her jerry can and discussed the future.
“It’s not been normal,” she said recently, noting that there had been little rain in her region in the last third of 2011. “And when there’s no water, what can we do? This is the only water point we have.”
Was Berhe worried about the potential for continued poor harvests in the region? “We are worried about food if there is not sufficient rain. These farms are having trouble. So yes, we do worry about food.”
Chris quotes Legesse Dadi, an agricultural specialist with Catholic Relief Services in Addis Ababa, who sees sees an emerging pattern of climate change-induced drought slowing chipping away at the stability of rural areas.
“The frequency of drought is eroding resources, so people don’t have that much to save for the ‘problematic’ days,’” he said.
One result? Large cities like Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa or Kenya’s capital Nairobi are now swelling with people who have had trouble making a go of it on the land.
And that means that future food crises will not be solely a phenomenon of the rural poor.
Food crises are more and more affecting not only the rural poor, but the one-time farmers and laborers who have migrated from the countryside to urban areas seeking a better life.
These carpenters, day laborers and street merchants of the city now live, as my Church World Service colleague Sammy Matua notes, in “high-risk backyards” of urban areas — slums where water-borne diseases are prevalent, where the crowded “squeeze of living” puts undue pressures on people. “People are struggling, they feel shame, and the food crisis creates that shame,” Matua said.
The shocks are perhaps no more so evident than in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest slums.
