Applaud Oxfam's Call to Reinvent Counter-Famine Efforts in Ethiopia and Beyond

For years, humanitarian public health experts have been calling for global actors to invest in preventing hunger, rather than waiting until the body count rises before responding and having the crisis come back year after year. Now Oxfam has made another rally cry for reinventing counter-famine aid in the case of chronic-hunger zones in Ethiopia. Shout it from the roof. Let's add it to our priority list on US foreign aid reform.

Perhaps you've wondered why so many hunger zones in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Zambia, and elsewhere have chronic hunger no matter how much aid is poured in? For those new to the topic of hunger prevention aid ("food security," as aid workers call it), here's a crash course. If you ever donate to famine relief, take note...

Traditional hunger aid drops food supplies in places where there is a shortage. Sounds simple, but as aid agencies began to realize in Nigeria in the 1960s and as Amartya Sen clarified in his book, Poverty and Famines in 1982, hunger is rarely about a lack of food but more often about a lack of access to existing food supplies. Even when there is a drought or shortage in one place, there tends to be food produced or stored nearby, like by farmers just outside the affected regions or by well-to-do families who stock up before droughts.

Alex de Waal made a special point in his quintessential aid critique, Famine Crimes in 1997, that when aid agencies dump free foreign grains and oils into hunger regions, it can sometimes lead to a dramatic drop in the price of grains and oils in nearby markets. Good for poor families seeking to buy, but if the price drops too low this can sometimes run local and nearby farmers, who often employ poor laborers, out of business as that they may not be able to afford producing local food the following season. Laborers lose their jobs and the market may be even more empty the following year.

Also, the funding spent on shipping grain from the US to a place like Ethiopia could be used instead to buy a higher quantity of supplies in nearby poor markets or to invest in enhancing local agricultural systems to prevent future shortages.

Preventing hunger is never as simple as just sending food. Oxfam, Action Against Hunger, and numerous other aid agencies have known this for a long time. However, many agencies are limited to what their donors are willing to fund. It's easier for donors to prove to their base at home that food drops reduced numbers dead then to prove that investment in agricultural systems prevented suffering.

Other times, as in Sudan, agencies have revolutionized the system specifically to prevent chronic need, but found other obstacles such as landmine saturation in farmland or befuddlement when faced with protecting farmers from maurading bandits.

In Ethiopia, Oxfam released its new report, "Band Aids and Beyond," specifically to remind the aid community - donors and traditional relief agencies - that they need to adapt to funding more preventive measures before hunger, rather than simply waiting until people begin to die and then flooding the market with food aid. The report lists a great number of examples. Here's a simple one:

In the unfarmable, arid areas of the African Horn, like in the Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia, people herd livestock. Everything they need relies on their livestock's survival. Traditionally they adapt to the seasonal drought by digging berked's, which are a kind of water storage well. The rudimentary versions retain enough rain water for the livestock throughout normal dry seasons but dry early in harsh seasons.

If the local government or aid agency simply invests a little bit of funding to build more robust, covered berked wells fewer livestock will die during drought, saving families. This is just one of many examples of "smart aid," which could prevent the chronic need for food aid.

Sadly, experts have been saying all of this for years and yet change is coming very slowly.

If you want to learn more beyond the Oxfam report linked above, one of the best places to find learning materials, reports, and the latest studies is the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts.

[Photo: Farming development, an agency other than Oxfam, Awassa, Ethiopia, Yigal Chamish]