Three Famines Read Online Free
Author: Thomas Keneally
and a mercy of God. It is also high in calcium, phosphorus, iron, potassium, thiamine, amino acids and more.
The pastoral people in Ethiopia and Eritrea and the semi-nomadic people who lived in the eastern lowlands of Ethiopia near Somalia and the Red Sea, or in the western lowlands near the Sudanese border, owned camels, but above all the livestock they treasured were longhorn zebu cattle. Creatures so cherished by the pastoral Ethiopians look very scrawny and are often diseased, but they were beautiful and important in the eyes of their owners and produced milk, essential to their existence. Pastoralists also owned goats, which they used for meat and also for milk. They lived, and often still live, in tuqals – fold-up beehive shelters of grass and bark, easily loaded onto a camel if the livestock chose to move on to newpastures. As materially poor as they might seem to outsiders, to them their lives were the only desirable version. Yet they knew that some sudden affliction or some drastic failure of rain had the power to suspend and even destroy this.
The failure of potatoes, the lack of rice, the withering of fields of teff were the various instigators that created the conditions for these three great famines, even though for their true causes we must eventually look to other factors.
3
Nature’s Triggers
F AMINE ALWAYS HAS an initiating spark or trigger, a natural disaster that may have a greater or lesser impact on the crops growing on farmers’ land, and an event that tests the political will and wisdom of governments, the latter being more a potential cause of disaster than a trigger.
The triggers for the Ethiopian famines were the failure of one or both annual rains in 1973-4, and 1982 and 1985. Lack of rain was combined with the sudden appearance in the fields of army worms, a larval form of a moth, in reality a caterpillar rather than a worm, which is blown north on the wind from Kenya. In the past, army worms on their own had always been a blight, and Ethiopian farmers abhorred the sudden appearance of these insects among their crops. It was said, indeed it is still said, that they could devour a hectare of grain faster than a herd of 400 cattle. So their work impoverished overnight the owners of a hectare-and-a-half farm, theaverage size of land holding among the peasantry. Sometimes farmers planted peas among their grain crop as an insurance, since the army worms did not favour them. But peas occupied space the farmers often needed to give to their teff. In the 1970s and 1980s, the logistics of spraying crops, even if sufficient stocks of pesticide had been held in the country, continued to be beyond the capacities of both the emperor and the Derg.
Of people from Tigray in northern Ethiopia who fled to Somalia and Sudan in 1984 and were interviewed later, 30 per cent said army worms were as much of a problem to them as drought. One Tigrayan in Wad Kauli camp in the Sudan said, ‘I decided to leave home because of the drought and our enemy [the Derg]. Insects and the lack of rain were equally important, but the government caused the famine too.’
Farmers with a family of six needed to produce 1500 kilos of food a year: 1200 for the family, the remaining 300 kilos being sold locally to buy other food, shoes, clothes and other needs. The crop did not need to decline much before the family had nothing to spend.
The rain failures threatened both the highland and lowland people. The highlanders feared their injera would vanish, and the lowland graziers suffered anxiety about the milk and meat of their quickly dying goats and the continued health of their cattle. The drying-out of waterholes and pasture in the lowlands and the consequent death or deterioration of their cattle, were watched with bewilderment and concern by the cattle-owning and grazing peoples of Ethiopia.
In 1769–70, a Bengal famine was estimated to have caused the death of 10 million out of 30 million inhabitants. Yet the province
The pastoral people in Ethiopia and Eritrea and the semi-nomadic people who lived in the eastern lowlands of Ethiopia near Somalia and the Red Sea, or in the western lowlands near the Sudanese border, owned camels, but above all the livestock they treasured were longhorn zebu cattle. Creatures so cherished by the pastoral Ethiopians look very scrawny and are often diseased, but they were beautiful and important in the eyes of their owners and produced milk, essential to their existence. Pastoralists also owned goats, which they used for meat and also for milk. They lived, and often still live, in tuqals – fold-up beehive shelters of grass and bark, easily loaded onto a camel if the livestock chose to move on to newpastures. As materially poor as they might seem to outsiders, to them their lives were the only desirable version. Yet they knew that some sudden affliction or some drastic failure of rain had the power to suspend and even destroy this.
The failure of potatoes, the lack of rice, the withering of fields of teff were the various instigators that created the conditions for these three great famines, even though for their true causes we must eventually look to other factors.
3
Nature’s Triggers
F AMINE ALWAYS HAS an initiating spark or trigger, a natural disaster that may have a greater or lesser impact on the crops growing on farmers’ land, and an event that tests the political will and wisdom of governments, the latter being more a potential cause of disaster than a trigger.
The triggers for the Ethiopian famines were the failure of one or both annual rains in 1973-4, and 1982 and 1985. Lack of rain was combined with the sudden appearance in the fields of army worms, a larval form of a moth, in reality a caterpillar rather than a worm, which is blown north on the wind from Kenya. In the past, army worms on their own had always been a blight, and Ethiopian farmers abhorred the sudden appearance of these insects among their crops. It was said, indeed it is still said, that they could devour a hectare of grain faster than a herd of 400 cattle. So their work impoverished overnight the owners of a hectare-and-a-half farm, theaverage size of land holding among the peasantry. Sometimes farmers planted peas among their grain crop as an insurance, since the army worms did not favour them. But peas occupied space the farmers often needed to give to their teff. In the 1970s and 1980s, the logistics of spraying crops, even if sufficient stocks of pesticide had been held in the country, continued to be beyond the capacities of both the emperor and the Derg.
Of people from Tigray in northern Ethiopia who fled to Somalia and Sudan in 1984 and were interviewed later, 30 per cent said army worms were as much of a problem to them as drought. One Tigrayan in Wad Kauli camp in the Sudan said, ‘I decided to leave home because of the drought and our enemy [the Derg]. Insects and the lack of rain were equally important, but the government caused the famine too.’
Farmers with a family of six needed to produce 1500 kilos of food a year: 1200 for the family, the remaining 300 kilos being sold locally to buy other food, shoes, clothes and other needs. The crop did not need to decline much before the family had nothing to spend.
The rain failures threatened both the highland and lowland people. The highlanders feared their injera would vanish, and the lowland graziers suffered anxiety about the milk and meat of their quickly dying goats and the continued health of their cattle. The drying-out of waterholes and pasture in the lowlands and the consequent death or deterioration of their cattle, were watched with bewilderment and concern by the cattle-owning and grazing peoples of Ethiopia.
In 1769–70, a Bengal famine was estimated to have caused the death of 10 million out of 30 million inhabitants. Yet the province
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