Why does ethiopia suffer from drought

Specialties include palm butter soup, futu — pounded cassava — and foutou — pounded plantains. In , Ethiopia experienced a famine in which an estimated 1 million people died of starvation.

However, in many cases, famine has multiple causes. A natural disaster, such as a long period of drought, flooding, extreme cold, typhoons, insect infestations, or plant disease, combined with government decisions on how to respond to the disaster, can result in a famine. A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, inflation, crop failure, population imbalance, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality.

As nouns the difference between famine and hunger is that famine is uncountable extreme shortage of food in a region while hunger is a need or compelling desire for food. A widespread famine affected Ethiopia from to The worst famine to hit the country in a century, it left 1. Has CRS been able to alleviate some of the effects of recurring drought in Ethiopia? Bunkers: Yes. Most of the people CRS serves in Ethiopia are farmers and herders, and thus heavily dependent on water for their livelihoods.

When these families have access to improved water sources for their land and livelihoods, they have a dramatically improved quality of life. The results are felt in all aspects of life, especially for farmers who have more food and income, and pastoralists who can ensure that their livestock can survive drought conditions.

To stave off some of the effects of recurring drought, CRS has been engaged in integrated watershed resource management for many years. The aim of these projects is to help people increase available ground water by protecting the natural resources within their watershed area. These efforts rehabilitate degraded land and increase ground water supply for domestic and productive use.

In any rural area, there are generally two options for water, either drilling a borehole and sinking a well, or using a natural source for water, like a spring. Unfortunately the trend of autocratic-led hunger has not changed under the current government either, if anything Meles's regime took it to the next level.

In Humanitarian Exchange Magazine exposed that disregarding experts advise that the situation in the country was very severe and does qualifies as a famine, the government of Ethiopia and USAID conspired to downplay the food crisis as "localized famine" in fear of global media attention and political dangers for the EPRDF. The report states "the lack of classic famine images Again in a report titled Development without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites Repression in Ethiopia , Human Right Watch extensively documented how the EPRDF is using development aid to suppress political dissent by conditioning access to essential safety net programs on support for the ruling party.

Today, once again the danger of another catastrophic famine is looming large on the horizon. After denying the problem for weeks; the government finally admitted to it but only to claim that it has enough food stock to tackle the problem. However, journalists on the ground has reported the government's grain reserve has run out long ago.

The government also argues the country has already realized food security at a national level, that is to say we have enough food in the country to feed everyone. The inherent flaw in this argument is that the presence of food in the country doesn't necessarily mean those affected by drought will have access to it.

As it was the case during the Wollo famine, when a crop fails it not only affects the food supply, it also destroys the employment and livelihood of farmers, denying them the ability to buy food from the market. Reports have also shown that the government was informed of the risk of seasonal rain failure forecast as early as two months ago but it chose to keep it to itself.

Had the government shared the information with the media and local governments to inform pastoralists to move their cattle near rivers or highlands, much of the animal loss would have been avoided and relief supports would have been delivered on time. Why is the Ethiopia government acting so irresponsibly? The answer is simple - because there is no incentive for the government to work hard to avert famine.

Amartya Sen argument related to absence of political incentives generated by election, multiparty politics and investigative journalism is also true in the case of Ethiopia. The EPRDF led government has successfully wiped out all groups that might pose any form of threat to its power. If there were a democratic system to keep the government accountable, the state's response would have been much different.

For instance, Botswana, like Ethiopia, is prone to drought but a democracy since its independence in , Botswana never had a famine. Botswana's democratic government immediately deploys relief efforts during every drought, and even improves them from one drought to the next.

Had the government in Botswana failed to undertake timely action, there would have been severe criticism and pressure from the opposition and maybe even bigger political cost in future elections. In contrast, the Ethiopian governments did not have to worry with those prospects. Another Sen's key argument is information flow and free press - democracy contributes greatly to bring out information that can have an enormous impact on policies for famine prevention.

If it weren't for the foreign media reporting and social media activists outcry, the government might have kept the current problem a secret for long and caused much greater damage than it already has.