![]() ![]() About midway along its length, a few hours’ drive south of Addis, it bisects a verdant highland of cereal fields. The Great Rift Valley splits Ethiopia into nearly equal parts, running in a ragged diagonal from the wastelands of the Danakil Depression in the northeast to the crocodile haunts of Lake Turkana in the southwest. That you could live in one part of a country and be oblivious to mass starvation in another: Senay would think about that a lot later. His parents were similarly spared the drought had somehow skipped over their rainy plateau. Students could eat injera-the sour pancake that is a staple of Ethiopian meals-just once a week, but Senay recalls no other hardships. The victims were hundreds of miles to the north, and there was little talk of it on campus. But the famine had felt remote even to him. Senay, who grew up in Ethiopian farm country, the youngest of 11 children, was then an undergraduate at the country’s leading agricultural college. That was in many ways the case in Ethiopia in 1984, when the failure of rains in the northern highlands was aggravated by a guerrilla war along what is now the Eritrean border. But in countries with bad roads, spotty phone service and shaky political regimes, isolated food shortfalls can metastasize into full-blown humanitarian crises before the world notices. In the paved and wired developed world, it’s hard to imagine a food emergency staying secret for long. And the earlier officials heard those footsteps, the faster they would be able to mobilize forces against one of humanity’s oldest and cruelest scourges. Senay’s innovations, some officials felt, had the potential to take those forecasts to a new level, by spotting the faintest first footsteps of famine almost anywhere in the world. Ethiopia usually gets the biggest slice, but it’s a large pie, and to make sure aid gets to the neediest, USAID spends $25 million a year on scientific forecasts of where hunger will strike next.įarmers in the Arsi region grow corn, barley, wheat and an Ethiopian grain called teff. The United States is the largest donor of food aid to the world, splitting $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year among some 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Agency for International Development, who had made a substantial investment in his work. At the top of a long list of people eager for results were officials at the U.S. Senay had come to Ethiopia to find out-to “ground-truth” his years of painstaking research. Was something amiss? Something aid workers hadn’t noticed? These anomalies can signal crop failure, and Senay’s algorithms were now plotting these hot zones along a strip of the Rift Valley normally thought of as a breadbasket. Geological Survey, he’d designed a system that uses NASA satellites to detect unusual spikes in land temperature. Almost as soon as I’d landed in Addis Ababa, people told me that 2014 had been a relatively good year for Ethiopia’s 70 million subsistence farmers.īut Gabriel Senay wasn’t so sure. The f-word, as some people call it, as though the mere mention were a curse, has haunted the country since hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians died three decades ago in the crisis that inspired Live Aid, “We Are the World” and other spectacles of Western charity. It is hard to look at such lushness and equate Ethiopia with famine. Across the valley floor below, beneath low-flying clouds, farmers wade through fields of African cereal, plucking weeds and primping the land for harvest. Fields of wheat and barley lie like shimmering quilts over the highland ridges. In early October, after the main rainy season, Ethiopia’s central Rift Valley is a study in green. ![]()
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