COLUMN ONE : Hoping to Leave the Famine Rut : Ethiopia: Instead of annual stopgap relief, outside agencies are sponsoring projects to build the country’s infrastructure--and paying workers in food.

EMBATEKALLA, Ethiopia —  Shouldering his spade, Khassaye Negusse clambered out of the ditch he was helping dig for a water pipeline. There were 200 people busy around him, pouring concrete and excavating around a remote watercourse five miles from the nearest road.

Like most of the others, explained Negusse, 65, he is a farmer, raising corn and wheat. It is an enterprise that has meant starvation in four of the last six years, when the rains in this rocky part of Eritrea have failed.

So today, he and the others earn their bread not by tilling but by building this project designed to take advantage of a stream by directing it into a filtration system for drinking water and preserving it for irrigation.

An unskilled laborer like Negusse on a project like this receives 18 pounds of flour for an eight-hour day. If he works a full month--he has worked six so far--he earns the equivalent of a month’s minimum nutritional requirement for the eight family members living at his home a few miles away.

“We manage to survive on that,” he says. Once the water project is completed, the family will be able to use its water, too.

It is rare enough in Ethiopia that donated food is used to develop the country instead of just being a stopgap to keep people from imminent starvation. And nothing would please Western aid donors more than to see more projects like the one Negusse is working on.

Work sites like this one, which will cost about $75,000 and 3,000 tons of food contributed by an Italian charity, seem to bear the best hope for Ethiopia extracting itself from the rut of drought and famine that over the last decade has become almost a permanent condition.

Already these “food for work” programs have contributed to a visible improvement of the Ethiopian landscape. Thousands of acres of Eritrean hillsides are terraced with stone walls ranged concentrically down from their summits in an attempt to keep the infrequent but destructive rains from washing away scarce topsoil.

Some are sprouting eucalyptus trees, the result of another program to restore forests stripped away by peasants’ search for fuel.

A dozen small-scale dams and water filtration schemes, providing local farmers with water for drinking and irrigation, can be identified from the stands of thriving green cornstalks that leap out of the brown landscape at infrequent intervals.

The West’s enthusiasm for these food-for-work programs stems partially from the phenomenon of donor fatigue: the weariness that comes from having to ship emergency supplies to this country year after year.

The coming year will mark another in which the world must mobilize to save more than a million Ethiopians from starvation. This time the crisis will strike Eritrea and Tigre, in the far north of the country, where summer and fall rains have failed, ruining crops needed to feed people in the first part of 1990. The U.N.’s food relief agency, the World Food Program, estimates that at least 264,000 tons of food will be needed to feed people in parts of the regions still controlled by the government.

More is probably needed in areas of Eritrea and Tigre held by rebels.

“No one wants to hear that Ethiopia’s in the soup again,” says Willard J. Pearson, local director of the office of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Instead, says David Morton, head of the World Food Program’s office in Ethiopia, “donors are talking more about what you could do with 1 million tons of food aid costing $300 (million) to $350 million a year.”

They are talking about devoting their food aid to helping Ethiopia irrigate its land, build roads from farm to market and plant trees to check erosion.

Such projects could work in this country for two reasons. The first is that, as a World Food Program official puts it: “This is one of the few countries in the world so poor that people will work for nothing but food. In a lot of other Third World countries, you would need cash.”

The second is that Ethiopia is in dire need of infrastructure. Over the last decade, virtually no money has gone into developing the country, as opposed to just feeding its people. The cause is a combination of the country’s extreme need and the distaste with which many Western countries view the 12-year-old Marxist regime of President Mengistu Haile Mariam.

The United States spent $109 million in Ethiopia last year, more than in any other African country. But every cent was in emergency humanitarian assistance; not a penny went into development.

That pattern is followed by most donors. In all, since 1985, about 94% of Ethiopia’s foreign aid has been emergency assistance.

That severe underdevelopment, like the annual reports emerging from Ethiopia of new droughts and famine menacing millions of people, contributes to the outside world’s misimpression that this is a country uniquely tormented by natural disaster and ill luck. But drought is not the principal cause of famine in this country--government policy is.

Agronomists say there is no technical reason why Ethiopia’s land could not only feed its own people but even produce grain for export. Its central highlands have potentially some of the most productive farmland in East Africa.

But most of this land goes unused. A recent survey by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that only about 40% of arable land here is cultivated and that only about 4.5% of its irrigable land is watered. The erosion of topsoil from land denuded of forest alone accounts for a 1% annual drop in agricultural productivity.

This meager use of potentially rich resources is what makes Ethiopia a place where natural misfortune turns regularly into catastrophe. The dearth of irrigation means that only a few inches of rain a year spell the difference between an adequate crop and a disastrous one, says Ingo Loerbroks, head of the Addis Ababa office of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

“Crop production in this country is characterized by quite extraordinary fluctuations from one year to another,” he says.

More than a decade of inept agricultural planning, much of it based on Marxist-Leninist principles already abandoned by the rest of the Communist world, has produced a decline of more than 20% in the country’s per capita food production in that time.

It has taken more than five years for Ethiopia’s crop to recover just to the level of the pre-drought years of 1980-84, following the famine of 1984-85. By now, the population has increased by 6 million persons and the annual food needs are 1 million tons higher.

Ominously, the gap between mouths to feed and food to eat is getting worse. One American study has concluded that the annual food deficit here will rise to 2 million annually during the 1990s, after averaging about 1 million tons a year during the 1980s.

To be fair, it is not an oversight that Western donors have been wary of spending more money on development: The Mengistu regime has helped wreck the few projects that exist.

A prime example is a major agricultural development scheme in the central district of Arsi, in Ethiopia’s breadbasket. In June, the project’s sponsor, the Swedish government, withdrew from the project after spending $50 million on it over 20 years.

“We realized our resources, by and large, were supporting government policies,” said Bo Stenson, director of the Ethiopia office of the Swedish Industrial Development Authority, which managed Arsi. Those policies, he continued, were clearly interfering with Arsi’s agricultural productivity, which had doubled between 1968 and 1980 before apparently stagnating for good.

The linchpins of the government’s agricultural plan are “villagization” and “collectivization.” More than half of the country’s farmers are now villagized, meaning they have been moved from their scattered homes into small communities, where they are given some common tools and permitted to till modest private plots.

In some cases, villagization is useful, say agronomists, because it makes available tools and equipment that farmers could not otherwise afford. But few of the experts have such good words for collectivization, a Soviet-style program that strips the farmers of all private holdings and binds them to work for their collective.

It’s a system that has been acknowledged as a failure in the two places where it was created, China and the Soviet Union, and today exists in its unalloyed form only here, perhaps the least suitable place in the world.

“Collectivization requires good management because there is no individual incentive, and that’s precisely what this country doesn’t have,” Stenson said.

One region that did have management-oriented farmers, however, was Arsi, because the Swedes had trained them. The government took advantage of that to institute an unprecedentedly rapid collectivization of the project. More than 16% of Arsi’s farmers were collectivized, about four times the ratio in the rest of the country, in the space of two years.

Meanwhile, the Swedes saw that government agricultural extension agents, who at the outset were helping to train the farmers in the use of modern equipment and cropping techniques, “from the beginning of the 1980s were concerned less and less with technical assistance and more with political propaganda,” Stenson said.

Over the last 18 months, some government agricultural policies have been liberalized. The prices paid farmers by the government marketing board, to which they must sell a certain share of their crop, have been raised, encouraging farmers to grow more. Rules that prohibited the shipment of grain across provincial borders, which contributed to famines by hampering the distribution of food from places where it was abundant to those where it was scarce, have been lifted.

Although some Western agronomists say the changes are too gradual to mean much, some donors, including the European Community and the World Bank, view them positively enough to increase development aid. But many still think a more efficient use of their money is to support the small-scale projects that exchange food for work promoting development.

There are still many complications hindering a genuine expansion of the food-for-work concept. One is the problem facing any similar proposal in the United States to make welfare recipients work: How does one avoid depriving the disabled or sick of food?

Another is the need to avoid make-work.

“Unless the thing is useful, you might as well just give the food to them,” said the World Food Program’s Morton. He alludes to a eucalyptus project that planted the wrong trees on the wrong land: “If you get a couple of thousand people planting trees (which) all die, it will be hard to get them to plant trees again.”

Many Western donors also resist such unconventional proposals as to sell the food they contribute in Ethiopian markets, then use the cash to pay workers in places here where a cash economy still exists.

But many Ethiopians do not share these misgivings.

“We should put people to work to improve the land,” said Ghirmai Woldu, chief project engineer for the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat, which is financing the Embatekalla water project. “What should we be, always a nation of beggars?”