Ethiopian sky

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GEOGHEGAN:  Ethiopia offers plenty of surprises.  It is, in parts, remarkably lush.  And yet hunger stalks the land.

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Green countryside/ Driving to sponsor child

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00:12

GEOGHEGAN:  For years, aid groups have been encouraging people around the world to give. I’m just one of the thousands of donors to do so.

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00:26

GEOGHEGAN:  I was keen to see how my sponsor child and her family were faring, so I ventured south into Ethiopia’s rural heart to find out.

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00:41

Geoghegan greets Tsehaynesh

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GEOGHEGAN [to Tsehaynesh]:  I only ever see photos of you and your report card so it’s wonderful to see you and to meet you.

GEOGHEGAN:  14 year old Tsehaynesh Degalo, has been a part of a World Vision program all her life.

00:59

Family farm

She lives on a small farm, nurtured by her father. But he can’t grow enough to feed his family.

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Tsehaynesh’s parents

FATHER:   We have nothing to eat. Currently we are eating the root of false banana.

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Family work on farm

GEOGHEGAN:  I was surprised to discover the family gets virtually nothing of the money I donate.

When I challenged World Vision, they told me that my donations and those of others go to community projects such as education.

01:36

So, at a time like this, when food is scarce, Tsehaynesh and her family harvest whatever they can

01:51

Tsehaynesh

TSEHAYNESH:  Until recently I didn’t know I had a sponsor.

01:59

Village children. Tsehaynesh and girls skip

GEOGHEGAN:  I’d been told by World Vision that Tsehaynesh was learning English at school and was improving. So it was disconcerting to find that she speaks no English at all.

GEOGHEGAN:  What have you been told about World Vision and the support that someone like myself gives you?

02:08

Tsehaynesh

TSEHAYNESH::  Last time they gave me this jacket and a pen.

02:26

Family at home

GEOGHEGAN:  When Tsehaynesh Degalo was included in the program she was the only child in the family. Now the family has six more mouths to feed.

02:35

Fating

FATHER:  Even if we wanted to control the number of children…

02:47

Father with mother

by using different types of birth control, it’s God’s will that we have seven children.

02:51

Geoghegan gives Tsehaynesh koala toy

GEOGHEGAN [to Tsehaynesh] :   Do you know what that is? A koala.

GEOGHEGAN:  The Degalo family is warm and welcoming

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Geoghegan gives gifts to children

and a few small gifts seem to mean a lot. Too often though they go hungry,  as do so many.   Here’s one reason why.

HOLMES:  There is grass, the country looks green, the animals can graze,

03:08

Holmes. Super: 
Sir John Holmes
United Nations Under Secretary

but the harvest, which was dependent on previous rains, has totally failed. So it looks ok but it’s not ok because there’s no food from the previous harvest.

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Animals graze/ Farm work

GEOGHEGAN:  This is not the scene you normally associate with famine, but then it’s no longer just drought that causes people to starve in Ethiopia. Since the country’s devastating famine in the mid ‘80s, the population has doubled, farm production has fallen, and now world food prices are soaring. Ethiopia is caught in an endless cycle of hunger.

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Men carry person on stretcher

A quarter of a century after the world heeded Ethiopia’s call for help, the country still can’t help itself.

03:51

ASRAT:  People like Bob Geldof and other artists just poured a lot of money to this country. So

04:00

Asrat. Super:
Gebru Asrat
Former MP

to see another famine in this country after 24 years is a sad thing.

04:06

Sophia Husein walking down road

GEOGHEGAN:  Sophia Husein and her family are among the 8 million Ethiopians – that’s ten percent of the population -- who are in desperate need of food aid.

HUSEIN:  As you see, I have nothing.

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Husein

I have a gum tree and many children. And my husband’s other wife left her children and went away.

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Husein with children

GEOGHEGAN:  Husein’s husband is sick and she bears the burden of feeding her family.

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Sophia and family

She has a small plot of land, but this season it failed to produce any food. The youngest child is malnourished.

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Child on back

HUSEIN:  The baby’s problem is caused by poverty.

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Husein

His mother abandoned him and I have no suitable food for him.

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GEOGHEGAN: The Husein family lives about 200 kilometres south of the capital Addis Ababa.

05:12

People queue at Médecins Sans Frontières

Ethiopia relies on this agricultural region to grow its food, but not this year. The local population of Shashamne has turned to aid groups for survival.

05:21

Food deliveries

Médecins Sans Frontières is providing food and medical treatment for the malnourished.

05:35

Children at clinic

Children are weighed, measured and checked for tuberculosis before being examined by doctors.

More than 16 thousand have been treated here.

05:43

Woman at clinic

WOMAN:   I do not have a thing and I have no food for him. And now I can’t breastfeed him properly.

05:56

Husein  and children at clinic

GEOGHEGAN:  Sophia Husein’s kids are among the more fortunate. They’re malnourished, but not critical.

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She gets a ration of food and is sent home.

06:17

Mothers and babies at clinic

Other mothers are encouraged to stay -- their children, dangerously underweight, are admitted to the stabilisation clinic.

06:25

Landscape

Now the rains have fallen, the worst may be over in this area, but further east in the Afar province near the Somalia border there’s no relief.

06:42

Holmes. Super: 
Sir John Holmes
United Nations Under Secretary

HOLMES:  They’ve had 3 successive years of rain failures and you certainly wouldn’t call it green area, it’s a  brown dust bowl, and that’s a different situation altogether, because the animals don’t have grazing. Livestock are crucial for the livelihoods of these nomads and that’s where it’s particularly serious.

06:52

Browning with women and babies

GEOGHEGAN:  Australian, Valerie Browning, has an intimate understanding of the plight of Ethiopians.

07:11

BROWNING:  The baby’s born small, from the mother’s malnutrition probably.  So basically we’ll have to treat it, treat the little girl with antibiotics now.

07:17

Browning. Super:
Valerie Browning
Aid worker

Just very recently we hit the worst, we hit literally death by hunger of little children and hadn’t seen that in 19 years.

07:30

Browning greets family

GEOGHEGAN:  Valerie Browning is reunited with her family after spending weeks walking through Ethiopia’s remote Afar region, visiting isolated villages.

07:49

Family have lunch

She settled here two decades ago after falling in love with the land and its people -- people who are now suffering.

BROWNING:  Ethiopia is suffering more and more drought, the droughts are coming one after the other and very viciously.

08:00

Browning

I think we’re in a very, very urgent time. If we don’t work now, right now, then we’ve lost the day, I really believe that.

08:15

Browning and Geoghegan in car

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08:26

GEOGHEGAN:  Valerie Browning works for a local aid group providing food and development assistance to the 2million nomadic pastoralists who live in Afar.

08:35

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08:45

BROWNING:  Hunger death is humiliating. It’s difficult for the family. The family hasn’t been able to cope.

08:48

Browning and Geoghegan visit community

GEOGHEGAN:  This community is on the edge of Afar.

09:01

BROWNING:  I drive through here all the time, they’ve recently had rain and it’s recently greened up, but they’ve been having a pretty severe drought here too.

09:05

GEOGHEGAN:  Temperatures here regularly soar beyond 50 degrees. It’s an inhospitable environment. There’s little vegetation for the livestock and little food for the people.

09:17

GEOGHEGAN:  So what would they be eating, what would they be surviving on?

BROWNING:  He says he has milk.

09:28

GEOGHEGAN:  These people are lucky. They’re receiving foreign aid assistance. They get grain or money in return for work.

09:47

But it isn’t just the drought that’s hurting these people.

Rising world food prices are compounding the crisis.

09:57

Browning. Super:
Valerie Browning
Aid worker

BROWNING:  We’ve seen grain prices, just a bag of grain go from what it was 12 months ago, 90 Birr a bag, the cheapest bag you can get now is 300 Birr. In some parts of Afar it’s 600 Birr. Now who can buy that? You have to go hungry. You have to go hungry.

10:08

Browning with baby

Most Afar families are down to two meals a day. Some are down to one.

10:35

Browning

I’ve seen them mixing tiny bits of grain with huge amounts of water, boiling it up and calling it porridge, and drinking that as a meal, and it’s just a very thin broth is what they’re eating, you know, and  they are desperately hungry people.

10:43

Addis Ababa construction

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11:01

GEOGHEGAN:  While millions of Ethiopians are starving, the country’s economy is booming, and there are plenty of signs of that in the capital, Addis Ababa.

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11:17

GEOGHEGAN:  High economic growth has been encouraged by the world’s wealthy nations, as the country strives to meet its Millennium Development goals.

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11:28

BROWNING:  The issue here is that the government is certainly pushed far too hard by the first world to have to say that we are performing well. So we’re working on this massive macro policies.

11:36

Browning

We hope that this will filter down to the people. But we’re seeing increased poverty at the base level. Now the base level is not part of the economy. It’s becoming a vicious cycle.

11:53

GEOGHEGAN:  Ethiopia’s economic growth has come at a cost -- inflation has soared to 40%.

12:08

Geoghegan at market

Here at the main produce market at Addis Ababa food is plentiful, but hardly affordable.

12:20

GEOGHEGAN:  So prices are going up?

MAN:  Yes very much.

GEOGHEGAN:  Can you give us an idea of how much they’ve gone up?

MAN:  Three times bigger than the former price.

12:27

GEOGHEGAN:  So you think there is a food crisis?

YOUNG MAN: Right, absolutely there is crisis and there is starving. Children and women are starving.

12:44

People queue for grain

GEOGHEGAN:  For the first time in a generation famine has come to the capital.

12:59

It’s the early hours of the morning in Addis Ababa and a queue has been growing through the night. Word has spread that wheat is being sold here at government subsidised prices.

13:07

GEOGHEGAN:  Are you struggling to feed yourself?

MAN: Yes, because there is a shortage of food.

GEOGHEGAN:   How many do you have to feed, do you have a family?

MAN:  Yes, I do have six family.

13:19

GEOGHEGAN:  Is there a problem?

13:39

Geoghegan to camera

Some clients may wish to cover this PTC. There is a patch for this after the conclusion of the story

GEOGHEGAN:  Well, government security agents have just told us that we’re not allowed to film here, that we should move on. Clearly there’s a lot of sensitivity about seeing images like this of people in need in the middle of the capital, so desperate.

13:47

Security man making phone call

But, it’s not just the media that the government tries to intimidate. Aid groups are also harassed -- some  have been banished from the country.

No aid organisations would talk about the intimidation for fear of reprisals from the government.

14:02

Asrat

ASRAT:  The majority of the population do live under dire poverty. And well, in Ethiopia millions are getting poorer and poorer every year.

14:18

Asrat walks

GEOGHEGAN:  Gebru Asrat was a member of the government until 7 years ago when he was expelled for criticising what he says were oppressive and undemocratic policies.

14:35

Homeless man in gutter

International aid organisations accuse the government of understating the current food crisis.

14:48

ASRAT:  They don’t want to tell the world that they have another side of the story, another side another picture of the country where millions are starving.

14:56

Farming

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15:06

GEOGHEGAN:  Despite repeated efforts no-one from the government would talk to us about the scale of the problem. The population has exploded to more than 80 million. As a result, land is over farmed and food production has fallen.  The UN worries that the country has developed a culture of dependency.

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Music

15:28

HOLMES:  What we want to do is to make the population in these rural areas more resilient, to improve the whole rural economic infrastructure,

15:32

Holmes. Super: 
Sir John Holmes
United Nations Under Secretary

and to make sure farmers, small farmers, can be more productive can produce more income and therefore we can get away from this dependency syndrome.

15:40

GEOGHEGAN:  But Gebru Asrat says, the government is not doing enough.

ASRAT:  During the rainy season, a lot of water pass to the surface,

15:49

Asrat. Super:
Gebru Asrat
Former MP

but the government so far has not harnessed and used it for irrigation work.

15:58

GEOGHEGAN: Are you saying that Ethiopia could be self sufficient?

16:03

ASRAT:  Really it could be more than self sufficient, it could be even an exporter of food for its neighbours.

16:07

Villagers sing

[Singing]

16:14

GEOGHEGAN:  For now though, most Ethiopians like the family of my sponsor child, struggle from day to day. Tsehaynesh Degalo’s parents realise they  must change their way of life if this endless cycle of hunger is to be stopped.

16:22

Tsehaynesh’s parents

FATHER:  In the future we don’t want to depend on agriculture, if God approves.

16:40

[Singing]

16:46

GEOGHEGAN:  They believe education is the key to a better future for their children. And their eldest daughter is listening.

16:53

Tsehaynesh

TSEHAYNESH:  I want to be a doctor to help my family since they are living in poverty.

17:01

[Singing]

17:09

TSEHAYNESH:  I love all my siblings. I’d like to look after them if things work for me. If we’re successful, we can help our parents.

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[Singing]

17:26

Credits:

Reporter – Andrew Geoghegan

Producer – Mary Ann Jolley

Cameraman – Richard Davies

Editor – Garth Thomas

17:40