Ethiopians wage war on hunger
WINNIPEG, MB–Starvation is a recurring nightmare in Zemedkun Baykeda Habtyimer's homeland, Ethiopia.
He recalls the day a desperate mother in a village he was visiting handed him her starving son:
"I was not even ready to receive that child. I looked down and I was scared. It didn't look like a human being. It was just bony and covered with shrunken skin...I just raised the child, looked at the sky and said 'Lord, look at this.' This is overwhelming. This is beyond my hope–. And most of the village looked like that. This is the situation we face."
Food shortages
During the brutal famine that swept Africa's horn in the 1980s, the world came to associate Ethiopia with images of malnourished, swollen-bellied children. Since then Ethiopia has suffered a series of drought-induced food shortages: in 1988, 2001 and 2004.
For 23 years Habtyimer has been a forerunner in fighting hunger in his country. In 1991 the Ethiopian Mennonite church he belongs to, Meserete Kristos Church, commissioned him to found a relief and development organization.
Today Meserete Kristos Church Relief and Development Association (MKC-RDA) runs 96 development projects in the country. Last year Ethiopia's president awarded the organization for environmentally sustainable development.
Habtyimer, his wife and their three children are spending a one-year sabbatical in Akron Pennsylvania advising Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) on how it can best respond to food shortages around the world.
MCC is on a campaign to raise $1.5 million to buy emergency food for people in Ethiopia and other countries suffering from drought and recent rises in global food prices.
In Ethiopia the price of corn has risen to three times what it cost a year ago. Early this year a feeble rainy season dried up potential crops of maize and sorghum putting 6.4 million people in urgent need of food.
The (MKC-RDA) responded, as it has in past famines, with a food-for-work program. Local farmers earned food, purchased with money from MCC and Canadian Foodgrains Bank, by digging reservoirs, building terraces and planting trees in the Boricha region.
Every time a famine strikes, Habtyimer says, the organization is forced to interrupt its long-term development work with emergency food distribution.
In Boricha, improving irrigation, building terraces and planting trees have transformed about 40 hectares of arid land into fields of maize and ensete, an edible plant that resembles a banana tree.
"Ethiopia is very rich. There are a lot of rivers, a lot of lakes, lots of fertile land that is not cultivated. We can not make use of natural resources because it requires initial capital–otherwise we could be a major food basket for the rest of Africa," says Habtyimer.
As a child, Habtyimer's attended a Mennonite mission school. Habtyimer was in high school when the Communist revolution brought Mengistu and the Derg regime to power.
Dozens of Ethiopian churches were forced underground between 1982 and 1990. Habtyimer buried his Bible in his yard; Christians worshipped in secret.
After the Derg regime fell in 1990, the church flourished. Fifty Mennonite churches sprang up where there had been 12 before, says Habtyimer. Today Ethiopia has 460 Mennonite churches with a total of 360,000 members.
Church can respond
"Even before the closure of the church we combined development with spiritual ministry," says Habtyimer. "We believe as a church in serving the whole person–.People have come to the Lord Jesus Christ because of the love they see in our interventions."
The international church can respond to food shortages by supporting the work of organizations like MCC, says Habtyimer, and by addressing injustices that prevent countries like Ethiopia from becoming self-sufficient: trade policies that unfairly pit
developing countries against rich ones.
"Low-producing farmers need help; they are really disadvantaged," he says. "Markets are determined by the wealthy countries–[farmers] just sell their produce. They have no choice. To me, that is not fair."
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