(Bloomberg) – Saado Osman straps two bulging sacks of United Nations wheat to her donkey, one of the few animals the 70-year-old eastern Ethiopian herder has left since the rains stopped.
Like millions of others in the Horn of Africa nation she depended on that precipitation to provide fodder and water for her livestock. Now drought has killed 20 of her cattle and goats, leaving her family of 10 with just four animals.
“There is hunger here,” Saado said as she stood among a crowd receiving food relief in Afdem town in Ethiopia’s Somali region on Oct. 8. “For one year it has not rained.”
Rain failure from February to May this year in Ethiopia, one of Africa’s fastest growing economies, was compounded by a short and erratic primary wet season from June to September. That’s left 8.2 million people in need of emergency support, with the crisis set to worsen through September next year, according to the UN.
The effect may spread to the economy: agriculture accounts for 40 percent of output, employs almost 77 percent of Ethiopia’s 97 million people and receives significant government support, according to the World Bank.
Exacerbating the drought is El Nino, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean in the area around the Equator. Ethiopia’s economy, which has averaged about 10 percent growth over the past decade, contracted by more than 3 percent in 2003, the last time El Nino occurred.
Ethiopia’s economy has diversified into services since then, and agriculture is less rain-dependent, meaning growth of about 10 percent is still achievable in the 12 months to July 7, said Abraham Tekeste, a junior finance minister. “It’s going to be a very challenging fiscal year,” he told reporters Thursday in the capital, Addis Ababa. “The El Nino effect is very clear.”
Ethiopia will spend 4 billion birr ($191 million) combating the drought this year and needs donor support, said Mitiku Kassa, who heads the government’s disaster response committee. There are plans to import 627,000 metric tons of wheat and 20,000 tons of edible oil, he said in an interview in Addis Ababa. In total, 15 million people may need food aid in 2015, and an extra $340 million is required for relief efforts this year, the UN said.
The number of children needing emergency treatment for malnutrition reached 43,000 in August, more than during any month in the last major Ethiopian humanitarian crisis in 2011, according to the UN.
“I think we have properly managed the disaster,” Mitiku said. “It’s not out of the control of the government and development partners.”