By Stephen Robinson: Gewane

Ever since the summer rains failed, Bushta Abdi, headmaster of Gewane's junior school, has seen the mounting horror of Ethiopia's famine reflected in his pupils' faces.

"The first thing I noticed was they lost their concentration in class. Then I saw their bodies changing as they lost fat. And now the numbers in class are declining as the children are forced to leave."

Abdi does not expect much for his 315 pupils. There is no electricity or water, no lavatories, and no food to provide a school lunch. Yet simply by virtue of having a school to go to, Abdi's charges are, in Ethiopian terms, relatively privileged, so teachers and pupils do not complain.

But the disaster that is playing itself out around this town and throughout the northeastern Afar region is one challenge for which Abdi has no answer. In one class, 40 of the 110 pupils have simply disappeared as their parents take their chances and flee to the cities.

If this famine reaches the peak that sober and scientifically based predictions suggest, many of the children left behind around Gewane will be dead within a year. By wiping out Ethiopia's tentative efforts to educate its children, this famine is entrenching the relentless cycle of hunger and underdevelopment by throwing the consequences of this crisis forward into the next generation.

We are conditioned by haunting television images to see famine in terms of fly-blown faces and swollen bellies, but that stage has not yet been reached. Ethiopian famines have their own awful rhythm: first the cattle die, then the goats, and then the people.

The first stage has now been reached because the meher (main) rains of June to September failed, so there is no grass on the ground, and the cattle are dying in their hundreds of thousands.

FARM-Africa, an aid agency active in this region, believes that one-third of the cattle in Afar have already died, and that soon none will be left.

Afar is largely a pastoralist farming society in which the economy is based entirely on livestock. The pastoralists build up herds of cattle, move them around from season to season in search of pasture, then exchange them for grain to feed their families. There are no banks, and virtually no cash economy to speak off, so cattle are not just a form of exchange, but also the only store of capital.

As the cattle die, the entire rural economy is destroyed. The local people have no way of feeding themselves other than to cadge sacks of maize from the relief agencies.

Husiene Ibrahim, a local headman and agricultural commissioner for the Afar region, fears that this famine will be worse than the one of 1984-85. "The people are already eating just one meal a day from the aid food stores. There is no fresh water to drink so the children are drinking from rivers and spreading diseases because that is where people throw the dead cows."

Even if the lighter spring rains bring limited relief next year, some 17 million Ethiopians in the affected areas are facing the terrible struggle of getting through the next four months with no prospect of rain.

In times of famine, it is often impossible to know precisely what has caused a child's death, because so many diseases are caused or made worse by malnutrition. It is clear from talking to local medical personnel in the villages that children are already dying of diseases that they would survive in normal times.

FARM-Africa sends units of experts to set up camp for three months in villages, and advise the communities on animal husbandry and disease prevention, but it is clear that the relatively small charity is overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis. It has been working to improve the health of livestock, but is now planning to offer assistance in slaughtering animals efficiently.

At one settlement at Beida on the banks of the Awash River, the consequences of the drought are plain to see. The clan leader, Aden Uda, used to be a rich man, but he has lost 93 of his 100 cattle and is humiliated by having to rely on aid to feed himself and his family.

The villagers keep their cattle in a central kraal, feeding them leaves from the trees in a desperate attempt to keep the remaining scrawny animals alive. Many of the grass huts have been abandoned by families who decided to take their chances in less remote regions, where deliveries of food might be more reliable.

No one knows exactly where all the people are going, but clusters of hungry refugees gathered around churches and junctions in Addis Ababa have alerted residents of the capital to the crisis in the rural areas.

In the capital, many are angry with their own government for its failure, yet again, to heed past warnings about drought. Much-needed agricultural reforms have been delayed, and the government's refusal to restore private land ownership to small farmers has exacerbated the crisis by discouraging conservation.

The failure to resolve the festering border dispute with Eritrea has made matters in the north far worse, and disputes with Somali tribes have increased tensions. In Afar, the majority of men walk around armed, either with AK-47s slung across their shoulders, or with traditional daggers.

In Addis Ababa, the government appears to have abandoned all efforts to deal with the crisis itself. Having learnt nothing from past famines, it prefers to shame international donors into action, gambling that the rest of the world will not have the stomach to be mere spectators to such a terrible human disaster.