'Food aid is not the best way to help starving millions'

CONSTANT food handouts from the West are failing to help starving Africans cope with ever-more frequent droughts, Ethiopia's most famous famine survivor said yesterday.

Birhan Woldu's stark rebuke came 25 years to the day since Michael Buerk's first television broadcasts showing the effects of a famine which went on to claim almost a million lives.

At the time, Miss Birhan was only three years old. Images of her starved body seemingly just hours from death helped jolt the world into one of its greatest ever acts of charity, which saved her life and millions more.

But yesterday she and others who survived the 1984 famine called for urgent changes to the way international aid money is spent.

"Twenty-five years ago, my life was saved by Irish nursing sisters who gave me an injection, and food from organisations like Band Aid," she wrote in a new report from Oxfam charting better ways to use donations.

"So it may seem strange for me to say now that to get food aid from overseas is not the best way. As well as being demeaning to our dignity, my education has taught me that constantly shipping food … is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency."

Mr Buerk's reports, and others broadcast in Canada and the US, helped launch both the 1984 Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas and the Live Aid concert in 1985.

More than £150 million was raised in what was the largest international aid appeal until the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

But that model is now out-dated and fails adequately to fund simple schemes which could stop millions ever reaching the situation where they need hand-outs, Oxfam said.

In its Band Aids and Beyond report yesterday, the agency said, "No longer should we be chasing each drought with food; we should be acting before the next drought comes".

Instead, donors should support programmes including weather early warning systems, improved roads, food and medicine stockpiles – cheaper than responding under the stress of urgent appeals – and irrigation schemes.

Yet this year, more than 35 percent of Britain's £154m aid to Ethiopia is to be spent on emergency assistance for the six million people facing starvation due to the current drought.

A further 17 million people across Africa's east and north-east are in need of food.

Ethiopia's own government yesterday appealed to Western donors for an extra £75m, despite being praised in recent years for efforts to prepare its citizens to cope with crises exacerbated by the changing climate.

Sending such food aid "does save lives", Oxfam said. But it is a "knee-jerk reaction" and "the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions which would break these cyclical and chronic crises".

"Donors need to shift their approach, and help to give communities the tools to tackle disasters before they strike," said Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director.

"Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution. If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them."

Many people living in Makele, a town in northern Ethiopia close to the famine's epicentre featured in Mr Buerk's reports, are still haunted by the tragedy of a quarter-century ago.

"Here we are not so badly hit by the current drought," said Bisrat Mesfen, 30, who remembers as a five-year-old queuing for food handouts after his family's livestock all died.

"But we can be finished by the next one. Giving people food only when droughts come is too expensive and is the wrong way to spend that money."