The Silent Emergency in Ethiopia

The southernly winds from Manchuria were strong and bitterly cold. I battled these unforgiving elements while driving a large vehicle loaded with charcoal and rice destined for numerous orphanages primarily populated with Amerasian children. The vast space of undulating rice paddies now frozen and filled with leaches provided limited access to the outlying villages desperate for the fundamentals of life: warmth, food, and medical services. This description depicts my humanitarian experience in Korea nearly 50 years ago.

A few weeks ago, I ventured to Ethiopia where malnutrition and HIV/AIDS dominate the health landscape and public health demands. As a visiting scholar at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, the College of Health Sciences, where the elite are instructed in nutrition and food science, I found myself seeking support from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) and answers to the too frequent signs of poverty. One of my colleagues and I were invited to provide a very condensed course about U.S. food law, regulatory structures and processes, clean labeling, agricultural practices, and how it is that complex societies keep the food supply safe. Initially, this was all very interesting and even exciting; there is a “but,” however, even within the capital city and certainly beyond those boundaries surrounded by hostility and social unrest.

Ethiopia remains one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. More than one-third of Ethiopians live below the poverty line of $1.90 a day and are vulnerable to food insecurity, and about 75 percent depend on subsistence agriculture. More than 10 million people needed emergency food assistance in 2016, and nearly 8 million required assistance in 2017. This is in addition to the 8 million chronically food insecure beneficiaries who are supported through the World Bank’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP). Twenty-nine percent of Ethiopian women are malnourished, and 44 percent of children suffer from chronic undernutrition.

So here is the “but:” Food law and regulatory science are obviously important, especially in a land where food regulations and food safety are minimal at best, but what are we overlooking here? In our clean, academic environments where we address the almost fashionable issues of the “global obesity epidemic,” are we overlooking something far more profound than overnutrition and its consequences? Are we overlooking the masses of children and adults in the world who suffer unspeakable agonies because they simply do not have enough to eat and drink?

The answer is clearly a resounding “yes!” Ethiopians, like many in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia are a fiercely proud and resilient people who are striving to design and erect a regulatory apparatus to assure food safety. But in the most basic terms, it is our humanitarian obligation to help them produce the requisite food and clean, potable water whose quality can be regulated.

Through Catholic Relief Services, Food for the Hungry-Ethiopia, Relief Society of Tigray, and World Vision, USAID supports nutrition-related activities to reach food insecure households under the PSNP. These activities seek to improve the nutritional status of targeted communities with a focus on improving the quality of health services for pregnant women and lactating mothers, raising awareness of healthy nutrition practices, improving the nutrition, water, and sanitation status of children, and much more.

Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services and poor hygiene practices profoundly impact health and nutrition; diarrheal disease is one of the leading causes of mortality for young children in Ethiopia.

While Ethiopia has relatively abundant water resources, it is considered “water stressed” as a result of rapid population growth over the past decade. Natural variability in rainfall patterns and distribution, punctuated by extreme climatic events, have thrust many regions of the country into conditions of extreme water scarcity and degraded water quality.

We do not know everyone we encountered on our brief visit to Ethiopia, but this much is certain: Here in the United States, while we make huge profits from writing books and holding forth on television and through cyberspace about diet and exercise programs designed to keep us in organic kale and high-fashion clothing, much of the world continues to starve and struggle.

Thus inspired and armed, we are prepared to travel and try to make a difference that counts among significantly underserved populations. We have attempted to make differences in Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and many other countries. For us to continue, these differences call for collaborative efforts among a spectrum of food and health professionals and the global food industry to help those masses who are less fortunate than we Americans.

Roger Clemens, DrPH, CFS, Contributing Editor
Adjunct Professor, Univ. of Southern California’s School of Pharmacy, Los Angeles, Calif.
[email protected]