Ethiopia, water irrigating health and education too

(Spanish version)

Report made with the support of Oxfam Intermón

Sinta, the taxi driver who shows me Addis Ababa from end to end, gestures dismissively when I ask him about the past. «Now we’re fine!», says with conviction. We meet very early in the morning in order to climb the Entoto Park, from which you can see the whole city. It has to be early because the engine of his Soviet Lada, he explains, is made for cold temperatures, and at certain hours there are slopes that it cannot bear.

He doesn´t understand what interest the communist years can have, which were particularly bloody in Ethiopia, or the consequences of the war with Eritrea. «That was ridiculous, a stupidity!» he states. In the eighties he lost a brother in the front. But all that is already forgotten, he insists. It´s over.

Hunger has always been connected to political change in the recent history of Ethiopia. It was the documentary about hunger, “The Unknown Famine” (Jonathan Dimbleby, 1973) that marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the emperor Haile Selassie. During the communist regime of his successor, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the political use of hunger plunged the nation into of the most catastrophic and darkest periods that humanity has ever seen. According to Robert Kaplan in “Surrender or Starve”, the fight against hunger served as an excuse for the communist dictator to carry out massive deportations and the fees he charged for humanitarian aid entrance into the country served to finance the war against Eritrea.

News of these famines spread widely through media coverage. Images of starving children marked a generation in the eighties. The impact was so strong that in 1989 the General Assembly of European NGOs adopted a code of conduct to avoid future campaigns focusing on the sensationalist aspects of life in the developing world and oversimplifying the image.

In fact, this image has long been in the past. Ethiopia has been growing for the last seven years at a rate of 11%. In the context of the international crisis, the economy has dropped to 7.5%, but Eduardo García Reneses, accountable for cooperation programs in Ethiopia, believes it is still “robust”. In December, an article in the Addis Ababa newspaper, The Reporter, stated that by 2025 Ethiopia hopes to become part of the “middle level” group of countries with development plans that are already under way.