Drought a major cause of hardship

Of all the natural disasters that strike communities and environments, a drought can be the most devastating. If it develops into a full-blown famine or forces people to leave their homes or become dependent on external food aid, drought becomes a humanitarian crisis.

Unlike the more dramatic “acts of God”, such as volcanoes, earthquakes or tsunamis, the full impact of a drought is more closely related to a country’s ability to respond or mitigate the failure of rains. Fragile state structures, underdeveloped infrastructure, poor agricultural practices and issues of governance are as important in this equation as the absence of water itself.

Travelling around Eritrea today, one often finds young boys digging in dry river beds to find water for their bony animals, or a slow procession of donkeys and their owners carrying water home through the heat of the day.

The water table throughout the country has dropped by several metres, relief workers and government officials say, thanks to a drought that has dragged on for years.

"We have had very, very little rain, especially in the past three or four years," Ali Abdu, Eritrea’s information minister, told IRIN. "Almost one-third of our population was attacked by that."

Some 2.3 million people in Eritrea, almost two-thirds of the population, depend on varying levels of food aid. And although 80 percent of the population is rural, the country only produced 85,000 mt of cereals in 2004 - just 15 percent of its annual requirement and 47 percent of its average harvest over the last twelve years.

One million Eritreans are likely to go hungry this year, unless donors can step up their food aid, a senior government official told IRIN in early May.

While it would be easy to pin the blame on long-term drought and the exhaustion of coping strategies, relief workers in Eritrea say these are not the only reasons for the country’s precarious food-security situation.

"Food security is more complicated than getting enough rain, or even producing enough food," said a relief worker who did not want to be named. He felt that the failure to produce adequate food crops since 1998 was also linked to Eritrea’s conflict with Ethiopia and its preparations to strengthen defences on the border.

The 1998-2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean border war, which was fought mostly in Eritrean territory, killed between 70,000 and 100,000 people and displaced almost one-third of Eritrea’s population.

It also left behind an unpleasant legacy of mines and battered infrastructure throughout the border region, and especially in Eritrea’s most fertile region in the southwest.

Relations between the two countries have hardly improved since the end of the conflict. When they signed a peace agreement in December 2000, both countries agreed that an independent boundary commission would make a “final and binding” decision on where the border should be. But the Boundary Commission decision, produced in April 2002, was later rejected by Ethiopia.

Three years on, the position of both countries remains essentially the same: Ethiopia says it will demarcate the border but would like to negotiate first (although it appears unwilling to do so). Meanwhile, Eritrea refuses to compromise on an international agreement.

So, how has a border dispute affected Eritrea’s rapidly declining food security?

The most obvious impact is the redistribution of money and manpower: An estimated 300,000 people are currently serving in Eritrea’s military instead of contributing to the country’s economy. In addition, government sources said, the dispute has forced Eritrea to put a lot of its scarce resources into military spending. Along with fuel shortages and rising prices of consumer goods, the already weak economy has declined.

"We are dealing with four years of consecutive drought," Yemane Gebremeskal, presidential advisor and chief government spokesman, told IRIN in an interview at his office. "This [drought] has eroded coping mechanisms and is putting severe pressure on the government. The overall security situation has also [had] an impact."

Following an assessment visit to Eritrea at the end of 2004, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a January 2005 report, "The shortage of labour was observed everywhere."

While their husbands serve in the military, women take on the responsibility of being head of the household. Because tradition frowns upon a woman working a plough, one-third of these women are forced to hire labourers to cultivate their land, compounding an already difficult situation.

"Due to continued critical shortage of labour, the wage rates this year have been observed to be very high […] Since farmers cannot afford to pay such high wages […] critical field operations such as weeding have generally been neglected," said the WFP/FAO report.

"The absence of many young men for national mobilisation reduces the range of household income-earning opportunities and coping strategies, such as livestock raising and off-farm employment," said the most recent report on Eritrea by the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) at the end of April.

Farmers in the southwestern province of Gash-Barka, Eritrea's main bread basket, told IRIN they could produce much more if their sons who were in the army could help them with irrigation and dam-building during the rainy season.

The government argues that soldiers work in state-run and private farms during the agricultural season, making up for manpower that otherwise would have been lost. Yemane also said that the military had constructed the water and drainage systems and houses in Asmara. "In a time of relative peace, 90 percent of the army works in the productive sectors," he explained. "We have never lived in a situation where the army is simply a fighting force."

It is worth pointing out that some of Eritrea’s most fertile land is within the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ), a 25-km wide demilitarised zone that runs along Eritrea’s southern boundary and is still patrolled by UN peacekeepers. The TSZ once accounted for a significant proportion of Eritrean food production, though precisely how much is impossible to say.

Roughly 50,000 Eritrean internally displaced persons (IDPs) are still living in camps away from the TSZ, unable to return to their ruined villages until the last of the mines have been cleared.

Eritrea’s borders with both Ethiopia and Sudan remain officially closed while tensions in the region persist. The border with Sudan was closed in late 2002, with both sides accusing each other of supporting armed opposition in the other’s territory.

The border closures have affected the agricultural sector in two significant ways, by limiting grazing areas and by restricting access to markets.

Pastoralists can no longer follow rains across national boundaries. Regional tensions have severely limited the coping strategies of pastoralists, who were once the powerhouse of Eritrean agriculture. The government has been encouraging pastoralists to settle, but adaptation has not been easy, sources say.

"We have not had a census for a long time, but pastoralism is still a very important sector," a source said. "Normally, if they move, they go in search of pasture. But now very few are moving because of the closed borders. So the pressure on forage is worse than ever before," he added.

The closed borders have also blocked a key supply of food, driving food prices higher.

"The loss of access to Ethiopian and Sudanese food markets, on which Eritrea traditionally depended for about one-third of its primary food supply, may have contributed to the current escalation of food grains prices in Eritrea," said the FEWS Net report.

Food-security experts prioritise the distribution of food aid to the most vulnerable groups, but Eritrean custom dictates that those groups who receive food aid share it. This tradition of sharing compromises the targeting somewhat: As a result, malnutrition in Eritrea is high - and lingering. But starvation, said relief workers, is rare.

The Ministry of Agriculture was unavailable to comment, but the government supports irrigation schemes, the livestock sector in general, and the distribution of food and seeds. In a situation of poor food security, however, a constant tension always exists between agricultural development and short-term food distribution. Seeds distributed for planting are sometimes eaten instead.

For the long term, food security in Eritrea will not depend solely on the weather. Drought is a problem that persists in this semi-arid country, but other factors - like good governance and economic stability - play an important role.

"The problem is not just to produce food, but also to earn enough money so that people can afford to eat," said an aid worker.