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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
#2000/843MR. ERELI: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the State Department this morning for a briefing by Leonard Rogers, Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Humanitarian Response at the US Agency for International Development. Deputy Assistant Administrator Rogers oversees the management of US assistance programs of emergency and development food aid, international disaster assistance, and through private volunteer organizations to American schools and hospitals abroad.
Mr. Rogers returned last week from a three-week trip to Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan where he assessed drought conditions in the region and US response. He will speak to you about that trip and new commitments of US aid for the drought in the region.
MR. ROGERS: Thank you very much. I thought I'd give a few introductory remarks and then take questions. My purpose here is to brief on what we see as a continuing food crisis in the Horn of Africa. I am Len Rogers. I'm the Deputy Assistant Administrator in AID's Bureau for Humanitarian Response and we provide, in addition to food aid, international disaster relief.
I did have the benefit of an extended trip to the Horn. Again, the trip started in Ethiopia, then traveled to Kenya, Sudan. I didn't get in to Somalia but was briefed on the situation in Somalia, and then wound up the trip in Eritrea.
As you can see from the fact sheet that was handed out, we still believe that over 20 million people are at risk if this crisis is allowed to spiral into a true famine. The US Government is treating this crisis as the highest priority humanitarian emergency in the world currently. So far, USAID and the Department of Agriculture have committed over $575 million in humanitarian assistance to the relief effort, and this includes over 1.2 million metric tons of food aid. Just to give you a sense of scale, 200,000 metric tons of food will feed a million people for a year, so 1.2 million metric tons is a substantial amount of food assistance. We've already had a large share of that delivered and the rest of it is in the process of being procured and shipped.
In addition, we are also providing assistance for water and health programs, and today, as you can see in the press announcement, we are announcing an additional 4.7 million in non-food assistance.
It's important to recognize that this crisis varies from country to country, and within countries is changing over time. While it hasn't gotten much attention, it's important to note, I think, that the roots of this crisis lie in the deep poverty of each of these countries and the persistent insecurity and armed conflict that afflicts them.
Again, just to give you a sense of the depth of poverty, even in the best of times we estimate that over 250,000 children die in Ethiopia each year from causes in which hunger and malnutrition are direct contributing factors. So, again, this is even in the best of times 250,000 children a year die in Ethiopia alone from factors related to hunger and malnutrition. In Somalia, as an example, 220 children out of every 1,000 born die before they reach the age of five, and so these child death figures are an indication of persistent poverty in the region.
But the immediate cause of the crisis is drought, and whenever drought occurs, as it often does in the region, it pushes this very vulnerable population over the edge and you have large numbers of people at risk. In Ethiopia alone we estimate over 10 million people are at risk. In Ethiopia, there is a persistent problem of drought. Again, if it spirals out of control, you can reach a situation as we reached in the mid-1980s where over a million people died directly as a result of drought and the failure of the international community to respond as effectively as it might have. It was a somewhat different situation in those days in that there was a government which did not cooperate fully with the international relief effort, and that situation is completely changed now and we are getting good cooperation from the Ethiopian Government in the current effort.
Our US response has been substantial. As you can see from the fact sheet, well over $300 million committed so far. We had originally been very concerned about two things. First, the capacity of the Port of Djibouti to handle the volume of food that was being delivered to Ethiopia. We are now more confident that Djibouti will be able to manage the load. Some food is also coming in for Ethiopia through Berbera, a port in Somalia.
The second concern we had was with trucking. We had been given assurances by the government that adequate trucks would be available to move the food, and that appears now to be the case that the trucking problems, availability of trucks problem, seems to be sorting itself out.
Our greatest concern now in Ethiopia is that in the Somali region of Ethiopia, this region down here and extending out to the Horn going into Somalia, we are concerned that adequate priority be given to this region by the government and by the international donors. This is a very problematic area because there is a great deal of inter-clan conflict among the Somalis that live in this region and it's a very insecure area and humanitarian workers are regularly threatened. So it's a difficult place to deliver assistance, even under the best of circumstances.
And the second area that we are primarily concerned about this is this area up north of the capital Addis Ababa toward these high mountain areas around Gonder. And the reason for concern there is that these areas become, during the rainy season, isolated and it is difficult to get the trucks in to deliver food into these areas. These are very densely populated areas so the risk for large numbers of people being affected is greatest up here. This Somali region is relatively less densely populated.
It is ironic in Ethiopia now that the rains appear to be quite good. Everywhere I went on my trip, people had crops already planted and those crops were coming up. And if the rains continue to be good, then we can expect a reasonably good harvest in early fall. And so Ethiopia has become a situation that we appear to be managing; if we can solve these continuing isolated logistical problems and we can get adequate priority to the difficult-to-reach areas, we think Ethiopia will be able to manage its problems reasonably well.
One additional point is you do have people starting to return, and this is a priority of the Ethiopian Government, that people be given the opportunity to return their areas up here along the Eritrean border, people who had been displaced by the previous conflict. Now that Ethiopian forces have moved into southern Eritrea, these areas are available for them to go back to and some people have begun to return to their homes.
Kenya has become a much more serious concern for us now. The rains in Kenya have failed completely and, unlike Ethiopia where it's raining now, the rains are not expected to return to Kenya until the fall. So the earliest that Kenya is going to be able to get crops into the ground is the fall. We're a long way away from having a harvest that will provide relief in Kenya, even if they get the best possible rains in the fall, and that's still an uncertainty.
As you may have noted, the Kenyans are already imposing water and power rationing, even in Nairobi, and Nairobi is relatively better off compared to other part of the country. The worse affected areas in Kenya are up in the northern regions and then down the east, down the east coast here in this area to the interior. I was up in Turkana which is on this side of Lake Turkana and Marabit, which is on this side, and it was very dry, much worse actually than the southern parts of Somalia -- of Ethiopia -- the Somali region of Ethiopia that I visited. So Kenya is a major concern now.
Kenya does have a reasonably good infrastructure, and they have a good system for distributing food and they have their own ability, their own capacity, to deal with the problem which is better than the capacity of the other countries in the region. We are expecting that in addition to the assistance that we are providing that commercial imports will play an important role in the Kenyan relief effort. They have already instituted some reduction in tariffs in order to encourage commercial imports, and we are hoping that they will continue to reduce tariffs on imported food in order to encourage these commercial imports. As I said, Kenya has a middle class that is able to buy food and so, if they are able to get imports at a reasonable price, that will provide some relief in the Kenya situation. In addition, as the fact sheet shows, we are providing substantial donated food aid.
Sudan, both Sudan and Somalia, interestingly enough, unlike the other countries in the region, appear to be having reasonably good rains. Aside from this area in Sudan, which is up against the Kenya border which has experienced the same sort of drought conditions, most of the areas in Sudan, particularly to the west in Equatoria, the rains are quite good and we expect a reasonably good harvest. The same is the situation in Somalia that the rains are reasonably good and we expect a reasonably good harvest.
The problem in both of these countries is the continuing insecurity that makes it very difficult to delivery the assistance which we do provide. The Government of Sudan was continuing a program of random bombing in the south, and there are inter-tribal conflicts between the Nuer and the Dinka in Sudan, and in Somalia there is inter-clan warfare that's been going on for many years among the Somali people. So insecurity is the main concern in both Sudan and Somalia.
In Eritrea, just as Kenya has now become a major concern, Eritrea has also become a concern for us because the fighting which began in May and the Ethiopian push into Eritrea affected the areas of the country which are responsible for about 70 percent of their domestic production. The military incursions came just at the time of planting, so the Eritreans effectively have lost most of their domestic production for the entire year. They just have one rain period and since they've lost that crop they won't be able to get it into the ground again until sometime next spring, next May and June.
So Eritrea will depend heavily on food aid for the next year or so. The areas that I'm referring to are this Gash-Barka area which was around the Badme Plain, if you remember, was the first area of conflict and then there is a valley that goes up sort of the center part of the country where a substantial amount of their food is grown. Ethiopian forces, when I was there, controlled the town of Senase, which is right there, I think.
So Ethiopian forces remain inside Eritrea. There are a substantial number of internally displaced people. By some estimates the number got to be as high as a million internally displaced as a result of the conflict. Some of those people have now gone back to their homes as the Ethiopian military has withdrawn from places that they occupied. However, the real critical thing I think in Eritrea, first, we did have some concern in Eritrea, as we did in Ethiopia, about the ability to distribute food and the availability of trucks to distribute food. And, like Ethiopia, they seem to have sorted those problems out.
We visited the Port of Mesewa which is up here, the main port for Eritrea, and they have been able to clear the backlog of food that had been in the port about three weeks ago now. That had been cleared and distributed to distribution points around Asmara and they had expectations that they would be distributing out to these points over the course of the past week.
So they seem to be sorting out their problems with distribution as well, and now the main problem that afflicts Eritrea is the need for this peace that has been brokered tentatively, the need for this to be solidified so that the Eritrean IDPs can return to their homes with confidence. While I was there they placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the international peacekeepers arriving in country and being deployed so people would have confidence that this was a peace process which was going to continue and which would allow them to return home.
So in all countries, all of these countries of the Horn, the US continues to monitor the situation. Our people on the ground working with the countries affected, the UN and other donors to sort out problems. We seem to be making good progress in sorting those problems out. Our main concern now is the actual delivery of our assistance, and we are encouraging other donors as well to expedite the delivery of assistance that they have committed to. We are somewhat concerned about the slow pace of delivery, but we are working on that problem as well.
And, ultimately, in all these countries what we need is the ability to return quickly to development programs. As I said at the beginning, what underlies all this concern of ours and this entire crisis is the poverty of these countries. As long as they remain impoverished as they are, then there will be another drought and they will face the same sort of problems if they're not able to get to a development program which lifts them out of their poverty.
Those are my prepared remarks. I'd be happy to take any questions.
Q You briefly mentioned other donors. I assume the Europeans are involved. Can you say the extent to which they are involved, and are there other donors beyond the Europeans?
MR. ROGERS: The Europeans are major donors. I don't have the precise numbers of their contributions, but they have committed to a substantial level of assistance, particularly in Ethiopia. While I was there they had a mission in Kenya that was reviewing the situation there and it was our expectation that they will be making a commitment there as well.
We are somewhat concerned about the pace of delivery, particularly through the UN organizations. The European Commission has a complicated problem with the UN organizations and having to do with paying overhead costs, and they are working that out. We hope they will come up with a solution which will allow them to move their assistance very quickly and we are encouraging them to do that.
Q Reuters is reporting out of Khartoum that the Sudanese Government is accusing the NGOs operating out of Kenya, led by Operation Lifeline, the UN group, of feeding and financing the rebels. And they threatened to shut down the operations of the NGOs unless this is corrected, from their point of view.
Do you know anything about this, and can you tell me a little more maybe the context?
MR. ROGERS: I'm not familiar with the accusation. I am confident that it's not true, from what I saw. We are always concerned about diversion of humanitarian assistance to any military force and we would be concerned about diversion of humanitarian assistance to the SPLA. We do monitor the assistance that goes in to Sudan. We're confident that the NGOs share our view.
There was some controversy, you may recall, about the possibility of the US actually providing assistance to the SPLA, and we have decided -- the Administration decided that we would not pursue that as a possibility even though there was legislation enacted which would have permitted us to do so. And I would be shocked if there were NGOs that were providing assistance directly to the SPLA military.
Q What kind of food is this, and where is it coming from?
MR. ROGERS: The process is that American - our food is procured in the United States. It's procured by the Department of Agriculture. It includes bulk grain like corn and wheat. It includes blended foods, like there is a blend of corn and soybeans and sometimes milk which is used for feeding children, particularly those who are malnourished. So it's a range of commodities which were available in the United States.
And a substantial share of it is coming from surplus agricultural commodities that the United States has available and which the US Department of Agriculture procures and ships to these countries - corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean oil, blended foods primarily.
Q To what degree has the Government in Sudan put limits on where you can operate, where the food aid can go inside that country?
MR. ROGERS: There are some limits, some "no-go areas" that the Operation Lifeline Sudan, which is an umbrella organization headed by the UN, and Operation Lifeline Sudan observes the restrictions imposed on it by the Government of Sudan. So if the Government of Sudan says you can't go into an area, they don't go into an area.
But, usually, the way it has worked is that they will prohibit landing at certain airstrips, and what the OLS people have been able to do is find alternative ways of getting food into most areas. So when I was there, OLS was saying they felt they had been able to come up with acceptable workarounds for most of the areas that they felt it was critical to reach.
However, there are still some areas where Operation Lifeline Sudan is not able to go. There are some NGOs who work outside Operation Lifeline Sudan and they will attempt to reach those areas; however, they don't have the same sort of logistical capacity that OLS has. So I think the bottom line is that there are areas within Sudan where we think there are people in need where we don't have adequate access and we would like to have adequate access.
Q Have you asked the Government to give you access there?
MR. ROGERS: Yes. We work through the NGOs and through OLS and we have - and they regularly request, and the US supports those requests for adequate access.
Q You spoke about the malnutrition rates in Ethiopia and Somalia. Is there any evidence that this year those rates have increased, or has the international community been able, in fact as you hoped, to get enough food distributed on the ground to avert any malnutrition problem among the population or avert any deterioration in the status?
MR. ROGERS: I think it's fair to say that there has been some deterioration. We saw earlier pictures from Gode, which is down in Somali region, of children in advanced states of malnutrition, so I believe it's fair to say that there has been some deterioration in the nutritional status of children. It is one of the things that the UN and the NGOs monitor closely and we are seeing unacceptably high malnutrition rates in some areas; however, we are not seeing the mass starvation and mass loss of life that we were fearful of and still continue to be concerned about. So I would say that the situation has deteriorated from the best of times in those countries, still not at the desperate stage but is a continuing concern.
Q One quick one. What were the dates of your travel?
MR. ROGERS: It was -- I can get the specific dates -- sort of the end of June for three weeks until a week ago, whatever those dates work out to be.
Q And there are several countries you talked about that aren't mentioned on this list of new projects. Do you foresee recommending or approving new projects in the region beyond these for, say Eritrea and some of the countries you talked about?
MR. ROGERS: Yes. As I said, we will continue to monitor the situation. We have people on the ground with the authority to commit money to new activities, so as needs become evident and an appropriate role for the United States becomes clear, we will commit additional resources to this region. And we expect this situation to continue into next fiscal year as well. We are hopeful that, in the case of Ethiopia, the rains will be good enough so the conditions improve; however, in places like Kenya and Eritrea it's clear the situation will be a difficult one for probably at least a year.
I'm sorry, you had a question before and I didn't get to you.
Q No, my question has already been answered on what type of food you were shipping.
MR. ROGERS: Okay, great. Thank you.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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