Hunger Amidst the Failed Omo Flood

“There is no singing and dancing all along the Omo River now. The kids are quiet. We adults go into the shelter and sleep silently. We are too hungry. The big rains have been gone for three years, and now we come to the Omo and there is no water. Go and give this news to your elders, our people are hungry.”

These words come from a farmer one month ago on the banks of Ethiopia's Omo River. The Kwegu, Bodi, Nyangatom, Karo, Mursi, Dassanech and other tribes, an estimated 200,000 people, depend on the Omo River floods to grow maize and sorghum, and to replenish grass lands for grazing cattle herds. The river's annual flood is a lifeline for these indigenous tribespeople.

Floodwaters have been small (2007), then smaller (2008), until the Omo's annual flood disappeared altogether in late 2009. The last three years of poor rains combined with the unexplained, decreasing flood has left the people of the Omo River hungry with little or no stored grain. Many farmers have stopped planting all together. Traditional cultivation sites are being abandoned. Last November, four men and two children died of hunger.

“The stomachs of our kids are distended from hunger. They have diarrhea. Will they become well or will they die? We don’t know.”

The dry season has begun, the grass has turned brown and livestock milk is drying up. Herders are selling off cattle and oxen to buy grain at local markets. Many oxen have already been sold, and few remain. Some children’s normally black hair has turned red from lack of nutrition. It is an area where roads and phones are few, and when food aid is allocated to the area, it rarely makes deep into into the villages along the river banks. The situation will get much worse before it gets better.  

The Omo River and Lake Turkana are usually an oasis in the arid southern Ethiopia/ northern Kenya region, but now hunger is at crisis levels. More than 6 million people across the greater region need food aid now. But it's not clear why those along the Omo River are amongst them. The Omo River's annual flood depends on rains which fall to the north over Ethiopia's western Shewa Highlands. (For an explanation of Ethiopia's rainfall patterns, see here.) The annual flood provides local farmers with their most reliable harvest and pastoralists with much needed grazing lands for their cattle. Especially years like this, when rains have repeatedly failed, the flood helps feed up to 200,000 people until their next harvest.

“They closed the water off tight and our land has become bad. If you later come to visit us you will find no people. People are hungry, some have already died. Open the dam and let the water flow." The tribespeople assume the flood failed because of the Gibe 3 Dam, a project that has been shrouded in secrecy. It's a logical conclusion for them, since they are in remote regions with little communication, and the government has not sufficiently consulted them, a violation of their constitutional rights.

Rainfall has been good enough over the Shewa Highlands the last few years to fill the Gilgel Gibe reservoir, and online data don't indicate any serious problems with the rainfall levels. So, the tribes are right. Someone or something has tied the river up in knots. But, there's been no official response on what has caused the situation.

The last sufficient flood was in 2006. Heavy rains hit much of Ethiopia and Sudan, causing phenomenal flooding of the Omo, the Blue Nile and other rivers. While some tribal farmers were treated to magnificently large crops that year, damaging floodwaters hit the Omo delta, causing massive damage and death to some river dwellers and livestock. The Government of Ethiopia has repeatedly said that damming the river will stop floods like that of 2006, where people and cattle were washed away. Lesser known is that widespread deforestation in upstream areas has helped turn moderate flooding into serious flash floods because rains simply runoff the hillsides rather than being absorped. Lesser known, still, the 2006 floods were further worsened by emergency releases from upstream dams like the Gilgel Gibe Dam, at the very peak of the flooding.

Local people believe that cutting off the flood will mean death, as they won’t be able to grow crops on the Omo River. They don't believe that the government will keep its promises to bring irrigation equipment to compensate for the flood being cut off by the Gibe dams.  But the flood is gone, the people are starving, and no irrigation equipment has been delivered to the tribes.

“We are hungry. We are people that eat from the Omo. Now that the floods are gone we have a big problem. We are afraid of death. We don’t know what to do. Some people will die of hunger. We are praying for an answer.”  

“If the Omo floods are gone we will die.”