As children with skinny arms and legs, and extended stomachs, appear on the nightly news once again – I am reminded of a trip to Ethiopia about 10 years ago.
As we traveled from Addis Ababa to the village where we would be introducing the Stay Alive HIV/AIDS prevention education program, we passed by miles and miles and miles of beautiful farmland. The fields were green and healthy looking. I wondered how this country could ever have a famine, with so much food in production. I thought, “This country could feed all of Africa!”
And then our guide explained the problem. They often have sufficient rain to plough the fields and plant the crops, but when the crop (such as wheat) is about to mature, it gets hot and dry and the plants wither and die.
So, the problem is water.
Then, as we traveled further into Ethiopia, we passed one, two and three very large fresh water lakes. All that wonderful water nearby, and fields of green turning into brown dried up plants – before the crops could be harvested.
Again, further down the highway, we arrived at a new irrigation project – pumping water out of a river up the hill to a community farming project – sponsored by an NGO (non-governmental organization), and supported through several international grants. Each family in the community was provided with one acre of land to farm, and the life giving water helped the plants to mature and produce food – every year, in every season (no winter in Ethiopia). The result – no more famine in that part of Ethiopia!
So, the solution is also water. But it takes a cooperative effort of many people to bring the life-saving water to the thirsty soil. This is one of the appropriate roles of government.
My husband and I helped drill some deep wells in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya, working with Reach the Children (an NGO based in Rochester, New York). The Chyulu area had also experienced periodic famines – much as the dry areas of Ethiopia and Somalia. But now, famine has been eradicated – through the provision of a “large quantity of pure water,” which waters the fertile soils in the Chyulu valley – year round. (See the Miracle Well story.)
The solution to famine is water. Famine can be eradicated – but it requires the cooperative effort of people and governments to deliver the water to the thirsty food-producing plants.
I grew up in the Columbia Basin of Washington State. My father farmed some of the first land to receive water from the Columbia River – which traveled from the man-made lake behind the Grand Coulee Dam to a farm near Othello, Washington. It required over a hundred miles of canals and ditches to reach our farm. The Columbia Basin Irrigation Project provided water for over 600,000 acres of farmland – at an original cost of $100 million (in the 1950s).
The World Bank alone is now spending over $500 million to deliver food and shelter to the starving people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
“If more action had been taken earlier we would not now be at the stage where so many people are facing starvation,” said Fran Equiza, Oxfam’s Regional Director.
How much better, to plan ahead, and build irrigation projects.
