THE FAMINE IN ETHIOPIA - SOME COMMENTS FOR YOUR ADDRESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87M00539R001501960005-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 16, 2009
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: January 4, 1985
• Content Type: MEMO

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The Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, D.C. 20505
National Intelligence Council
NIC #00077-85
4 January 1985
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
FROM: Frederick L. Wettering /
National Intelligence Officer for Africa
SUBJECT: The Famine in Ethiopia - Some Comments for Your Address
1. There are a number of African countries whose peoples face severe
food shortages this year. The causes for the famine or near famine
conditions now developing in Africa range from natural to man-made.
Recurrent drought, deforestation, soil degradation, rapid population
growth, primitive farming techniques, pests, and counterproductive
government policies must all be cited.
2. Ethiopia represents the far end of the spectrum, where a
government through a series of counterproductive policies has created a
situation in which as many as ten million of its citizens face the real
prospect of death due to famine and famine-related illnesses in 1985.
3. Let us look at Ethiopian government policies as a case study in
how to parlay a drought into a disaster through ill-conceived actions and
ideological blinders.
-- The Mengistu government continues to emphasize collectivizing
agriculture, creating state farms and collectives, and keeping
food prices low in order to maintain urban support. These
policies reduce incentives for private farming, cut into foreign
exchange earnings, and increase dependence on imported foods.
-- Until quite recently, the government has shown little
inclination to expedite emergency food deliveries to the hungry
remote areas, particularly those in Eritrea, Tigre, and Welo
Provinces where insurgencies are active.
-- Until recently, the government refused to raise the priority of
off-loading emergency grain ships in Ethiopian ports, with
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priority going to military materiel and material for the Tenth
Anniversary celebration of the Revolution in the capital.
-- The government has refused all offers from insurgents and third
parties of "food truces" that would allow grain to be
transported to the 4 million people who risk dying from
starvation in areas where insurgents are active.
-- The Ethiopian government has used food as a weapon. In urban
areas, for example, food rations are distributed through party
cells. In government-controlled emergency feeding stations,
incoming victims must be registered and certified by party
authorities, a system open to obvious abuse. Most damaging, the
government is using the drought and famine as an excuse to
forceably relocate tens of thousands of victims from Tigre
hundreds of miles to the south, without any evident efforts to
receive them in new camps. This last policy seems to many
observers to be a cynical effort to remove large numbers of
peoples from areas where they might support insurgents and
relocate them in distant areas in forced collectives. Even if
one does not accept this interpretation, relocation efforts in
other areas historically have failed--Vietnam-Cambodia comes to
mind--and the cost of a humane relocation is estimated by
international relief officials to be at least $5,000 per
person--a diversion of resources when every effort should be
bent to relieving the starving victims where they are.
4.' Despite the generous response of emergency food and medicines
from the West, the famine is likely to continue and spread given the
failure of the Ethiopian government to address the root causes and make
policy changes. Because of the largely unconditional nature of this
emergency aid, and because of the adamant and ideological attitude of the
Ethiopian government, there has been little change in policies which so
badly exacerbated the situation.
5. The relocation program is being resisted even by the suffering
victims, over 90,000 of whom have fled into neighboring Sudan rather than
be relocated. We see the anomalous situation of starving peoples staying
away in larger numbers from feeding stations for fear of relocation.
6. Rather than food truces we see continuing combat in the
devastated provinces between government and insurgent forces, with the
Mengistu government maintaining its hard-line position of terming the
insurgents "bandits" and dealing with them only by military means.
7. The Soviet response to the Ethiopian famine has been
illuminating. Soviet aircraft and helicopters, billed publicly as having
been sent to distribute famine relief, are being primarily used in the
population relocation program. Soviet food deliveries have been a bad
joke--a few thousand tons of rice, which is not in the Ethiopian diet.
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8. This sad situation illustrates what the President called for in
his 3 January statement announcing a billion-dollar program to help with
African famine--that there must be policy changes by the host government
away from actions which dishearten food growers and reduce food
production. Without such changes in policies, famines such as we are now
seeing in Ethiopia will become a perennial, repetitive disaster.
~
Frederick L. Wettering
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SUBJECT: The Famine in Ethiopia - Some Comments for Your Address
NI0/AF/FWettering:mjp
Distribution:
Orig - DCI (hand carried)
1 - DDCI
1 - ER
1 - C/NIC
1 - VC/NIC
2 - NI0/AF
1 - DDI Registry
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