Fourth Congress of the Association of African Historians

Ethiopia promises land with little promise

Marc Lacey NYT
Monday, May 31, 2004

WOLLIN BULA, Ethiopia When Ethiopia's government decided last year to relocate 2 million struggling farmers and save them from the country's cycle of starvation, the desperate villagers here signed up as pioneers in the effort. As they climbed aboard a truck headed for more fertile land, they sang and danced in celebration.

Today all 47 from this lakeside village who went have given up their new plots. All have returned home except a pregnant woman, who died on the way back. Now they are lamenting their fate.

"I stayed two weeks there, but it was like years for me," Temiru Gemechu said of the land where the government moved him and the other villagers, along with 300,000 others, in the lowlands of the Oromia region, near the border with Sudan. He and others who rejected their new plots complained of everything from malarial mosquitoes to too little drinking water.

Ethiopia's government is struggling to salvage the $217 million plan, which has dashed the dreams and endangered the lives of many of those it was intended to assist. The United Nations and donor governments were skeptical from the start but are now being asked to help save tens of thousands of settlers who have been stalked by hunger and disease even in their new homes, or who have abandoned those homes to return to their land, worse off than before.

The problems the government has encountered underline the tremendous difficulties Ethiopia has faced in trying to solve a lingering food crisis that is worse some years than others but never goes away.

Agreement is widespread that Ethiopia's farmers are too concentrated on tiny plots that even in the best of times barely produce enough for them to eat. When the rains do not fall, a regular situation here, a result is mass starvation. Last year, 13 million people were at risk of dying of starvation. This year, the rains were better, and the number of people at risk has dropped to a still alarming 7 million.

In this situation, desperate farmers have been migrating on their own within Ethiopia for decades in search of more fertile land. The government says such unorganized movement has caused more problems than it has solved.

So the government came up with a plan to move 2.2 million people, in three to five years, generally from crowded highlands to rainier lowlands. The idea makes some sense, but critics are questioning how it is being carried out.

Dessalegn Rahmato, director of a local research institute, Forum for Social Studies, said the extensive government plan was proceeding too quickly and with too little planning for so ambitious a project, repeating the calamitous mistakes of previous resettlement programs.

Ethiopia's woes have no one answer. Economic development is considered the key to improving the lives of poor Ethiopians. Improved farming methods also are important, and the country's rapid population growth is causing more congestion.

To act, the government has begun rolling out trucks and buses, and loading them with willing farmers.

Most of the farmers relocated so far in the latest effort were moved to land within Oromia, an area hard hit by previous droughts but with pockets of relative prosperity. But things have not gone well.

The United Nations was recently forced to start a relief effort in the region to prevent those who had moved there from starving in their new homes.

The World Food Program has begun food deliveries to the settlers in Oromia, supplementing government rations. Unicef is distributing medicine and mosquito nets.

"There could have been significant levels of mortality and morbidity, and we may still have that," said Paul Hebert, who leads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia.

Already, some settlers have died. Thirty children were reported dead in one area of Oromia, and Doctors Without Borders has found 40 cases of kala azar, a rare and potentially fatal disease caused by the sand fly, in two resettlement sites in North Gonder.

In other resettlement areas, people are staying put, but they are in such dire shape that aid workers are providing emergency assistance to keep them alive.

It is in areas where regional authorities have moved more slowly and methodically, as in the northern Tigray region, that the settlers seem to be taking root. But there thousands of people have been relocated instead of hundreds of thousands.

When it comes to government-organized resettlement, Ethiopia has an ominous history. In the mid-1980s, the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam forced 600,000 people to leave their land. Some 33,000 of those settlers lost their lives to disease, hunger and exhaustion, and thousands of families were separated.

The effects of past resettlements can still be felt in many Ethiopian communities. Ethnic conflicts between indigenous populations and settlers moved onto their land continue, most notably in the tense Gambella region, in the southwest.

Ethiopia is a one-party state, and the current government is addressing the food crisis directly, but in a way that allows it to remain in charge of food distribution. It has also tempered the resettlement. No one is coerced to relocate, unlike in the past.

Instead, the government likens the current campaign to the western migration of American settlers in the 19th century.

To limit strife among Ethiopia's dozens of ethnicities, the government is relocating settlers within the same region, although the distances are still vast.

The government made plans to feed the newly arrived settlers for eight months to help them start their new lives. Credit is available to help settlers buy oxen for plowing and farm tools. The biggest lure, the government says, is that settlers get nearly two hectares, or five acres, of land, which is as much as four times the size of the plots some of them are leaving behind.

Government officials call the problems that the mass relocation has encountered hiccups that should not derail the effort. "People are voting with their feet," Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in a recent interview with Reuters, citing the large number of people who have opted to resettle.

In an assessment conducted last year by the World Bank, settlers from one town complained that the authorities had misled them.

"Settlers from Arsi were told not to carry any household utensils, hand tools or even clothing," the World Bank said. "They were promised that these would be supplied to them at their destinations, along with keys to their new houses. Tap water, health and school facilities were also promised to the new settlers. None of this was true, and many settlers we spoke to felt deceived."

With such complaints, it is becoming difficult in some areas for the government to find new recruits.

Some parts of the country are resettling only the men, leaving their wives and children behind until the new land is cultivated. Aid organizations are advocating that approach because it is the women and children whose health is suffering the most. But aid workers also worry that Ethiopia's AIDS problem will grow if men are sent away from their families for a year.

Temiru's wife did not want him to go. She sobbed as the truck left.

When he returned two weeks later, she hugged him and they agreed to stay put. "I don't have much land here," he said. "But I'm going to work this land, and pray to God."