Ethiopia needs URGENT food aid for 6 million people

[The Nomad]

Ethiopia seeks urgent food aid for 6 million
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 30 mins ago

NAIROBI, Kenya – Ethiopia said Thursday it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people, an appeal that comes 25 years after a devastating famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million and prompted one of the largest charity campaigns in history.

The crisis stems from a prolonged drought that has hit much of the Horn of Africa, including Kenya and Somalia.

Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land. Agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and most exports.

Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia's state minister for agriculture and rural development, appealed to donors Thursday for more than $121 million. In January, he had said that 4.9 million of Ethiopia's 85 million people needed emergency food aid.

Ethiopia has long struggled with cyclical droughts, which are compounded by the country's dependence on rain-fed agriculture and archaic farming practices.

In 1984, Ethiopia's famine drew international attention as news reports showed emaciated children and adults with limbs as thin as sticks. The crisis launched one of the biggest global charity campaigns in history, including the concert Live Aid.

This year's drought appears to be slightly less severe than the one last year, which was exacerbated by high food prices. A year ago, Mitiku appealed for aid to feed 6.4 million people affected by drought. Many humanitarian groups have said in recent years that they believe the number of people affected by hunger is higher than government estimates.

Because of Ethiopia's large size and poor infrastructure, independent observers have difficulty collecting data. The worst-affected areas in the country's east are the site of a fierce insurgency and are off-limits to journalists. Aid groups say their movements in these areas are limited by military restrictions.

Nick Martlew, an official with the aid group Oxfam in Ethiopia, said the country's east should be green and healthy now, but that crops are wilting in the sun and won't produce a sufficient amount of food.

"Really until June next year there is going to be insufficient food around," he said. "Where we are in eastern Ethiopia you can look out and it's completely barren as far as the eye can see."

Drought and water shortages are also increasing in Ethiopia's south because of a changing climate, Martlew said. Oxfam is helping villages collect rain water for long-term use.

In a report marking 25 years since Ethiopia's famine, Oxfam said countries must focus on preparing communities to prevent and deal with drought and other disasters before they strike, rather than relying on importing aid.

According to the U.N., nearly two-thirds of Africa's agricultural land has been degraded by erosion and misused pesticides. In Ethiopia, where bad farming practices have led to massive erosion, 85 percent of land is damaged.

"The current humanitarian situation underlines our belief that while food aid — much of it donated by foreign donors — is important and can save lives, we need greater funding for longer-term solutions, which can begin to tackle the underlying causes that make people so vulnerable to disasters," said Oxfam's Ethiopia country director, Waleed Rauf.

In eastern Ethiopia's Hararge zone, the scene of some of the worst hunger and drought-related suffering last year, health official Aliye Youya said few infants had come in to the main feeding center for treatment. A new initiative by the Ethiopian government to put health workers in every neighborhood has helped, he said.

But he said he was still concerned about the lack of rain in some areas.

"(A month ago) there was no rain, especially in the lowland areas," he said. "But nowadays there is some rain. The drought is affecting the lowland areas."

[peace-]

war what else is new:
ethiopians have been starving since dawn of time

[The Nomad]

Ethiopia - The closest thing to hell on Earth.

Ethiopia on brink of famine disaster once again, says UK Minister
Published Date: 19 October 2009


Ethiopia is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe if next month's harvest fails, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander has warned.
Mr Alexander recently announced an extra £30m of UK aid to the African country, taking this year's total to £49m, but he added further assistance may be needed.

He told MPs that 25 years after the famine that killed one million people there was "once again a growing drought and conflict-related humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa".

In a written statement to Parliament, Mr Alexander said: "The humanitarian outlook for 2010 is very worrying.

"The current humanitarian crisis could tip over into a humanitarian catastrophe.

"The prospects for the main harvest in November, which accounts for 90 per cent of Ethiopia's annual food production, are a particular cause for concern.

"The late arrival of the rains and prolonged dry spells mean that the harvest is likely to be below average at best, with total crop failure a possibility in some parts of the country."

Mr Alexander said six million people in the country needed emergency assistance until the end of the year, a third of them living in the Somali region.

Unicef estimates there are more than 500,000 acutely malnourished children.

Mr Alexander called on the Ethiopian authorities to be open about the size and scope of the crisis and the help needed.

He also warned aid agencies were being hampered by the long-running insurgency in the Somali region and called on the Ethiopian government to help them to enter the area.

The famine in the mid-1980s led to criticism of the Ethiopian government as well as of leaders in the developed world who were accused of being slow to react to the crisis. Shocking television news reports led to a concerted international aid effort which included the Live Aid concerts run by Bob Geldof.

[The Nomad]

war what else is new:
ethiopians have been starving since dawn of time

I saw a study saying over 90% of western citizens associate famine directly with Ethiopia.

This isn't even accurate, 6 million are dying of gaajo in the most prosperous region. ONE region. Imagine how bad it is in the disenfranchised areas?

[The Nomad]

By Louis Belanger

Oxfam International Spokesman in New York
Posted: October 21, 2009 07:19 PM
My colleague Marc Cohen, a senior researcher at Oxfam America, reflects on the 25th anniversary since the devastating famine of 1984 in Ethiopia. He was in the country a few months ago: Twenty-five years ago, Michael Buerk’s dramatic BBC footage from Korem, in northern Ethiopia, brought a devastating famine to the world’s attention. Tens of thousands of people had sought refuge from war and drought in the town. Every 20 minutes, a camp resident died from hunger and related diseases. Buerk called Korem “the closest thing to hell on earth.”

[The Nomad]

Somalinet doesn't care about starving Ethiopian people?

It's the 25th anniversary of the Ethiopian self-inflicted genocide.

[The Nomad]

According to international aid agencies the levels of death and starvation last seen 24 years ago, are set to return to Ethiopia .

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985.

Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

Donor countries provided sustenance to 12 million Ethiopians last year, more than half of it through the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Having passed that total only eight months into this year, and with the main harvest already in doubt, aid agencies fear the worst is still to come. “We’re extremely worried,” said Howard Taylor, who heads the Department for International Development’s office in Ethiopia. DfID has given £54m in aid to the country this year, and Britain has also contributed through the EU. “This is exactly the time when we shouldn’t turn away from the people in need,” he said.

“Critical water shortages” were reported in some areas by the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs last week with water-borne diseases such as acute diarrhoea spreading as communities resort to drinking from insanitary wells and ponds. Unicef said that the outbreaks are putting extra pressure on its Out-Patient Therapeutic Programme, which provides healthcare in some of the most needy areas.

In Somali, the hardest hit region with a third of the humanitarian caseload and complications caused by a low-intensity insurgency, the mortality rate for infants has risen above two per 10,000 per day according to a regional nutrition survey, which gives newborns roughly a one-third chance of dying before their fifth birthdays. While there is no clear definition, one widely used threshold for famine is four infant deaths per 10,000 per day.

Declaring a famine is a political decision. While it can galvanise public opinion and bring millions into aid programmes, it is widely seen as a political failure. President George Bush challenged his officials to avoid the word, a policy known as “No famine on my watch”. Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission is charged with preventing famines of the 1984-85 type, the sort that bring down governments, argued Tufts University academics Sue Lautze and Angela Raven-Roberts in a 2004 paper.

Dismissing the warning signals, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said earlier this month that there was no danger of famine this year. And Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Britain, said at the weekend: “We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline.”

The main practical difference between a food crisis and a famine is whether enough aid arrives to keep the starving alive. So while the scope of the problem can be measured in the number of hungry people, the severity depends on the generosity of those in the rich world. And this year they have been miserly. Despite the promise of G8 leaders at their summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last month to provide $20bn (£12bn) to improve food security in poor countries, contributions have slumped dramatically this year as donor states have shifted priorities to supporting banks and stimulating their own economies. “The international community is not living up to its promise to the World Food Programme,” Mr Kebede said.

The WFP had little trouble raising its $6bn budget last year, but in 2009 it has collected less than half of that. Its Ethiopian operation, which had $500m in 2008, is short $127m this year, equivalent to 167,000 tonnes of food. The Famine Early Warning Network forecast this month that the shortfall would reach 300,000 tonnes by December. Rations for the 6.2 million people receiving emergency food aid have, as a result, been slashed by a third from a meagre 15kg of cereals, beans and oil a month to just 10kg. Even if the shortfall were made up today, it would take three months for supplies to be loaded on to ships bound for Djibouti, then transferred to trucks for the arduous overland journey to land-locked Ethiopia.

Aid agencies are worried about the main harvest this autumn, arguing that the time for action is now, not when the food runs out in November – usually the driest month – let alone when starving children with distended bellies capture the attention of the West’s television viewing public. Despite its good intentions, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid came towards the end of the 1984-85 famine, which killed more than a million people. Since then, Ethiopia’s population has doubled to 80 million.

Mr Zenawi’s government has set up a strategic food reserve which has at times reached 500,000 tonnes – though it is currently thought to be just 200,000 tonnes – which it uses to speed up delivery. As soon as they get funds, aid agencies can borrow food from this reserve, replacing it with supplies from abroad when they arrive. Although the government could release this food without promises of replenishment, it would soon run out; after covering the WFP’s 167,000 tonne shortfall, the stockpile would be barely enough to feed a million people for three months.

The underlying problem for Ethiopia is the erratic behaviour of the country’s climate, or rather its regional micro-climates. Moisture-bearing clouds scudding in from the Indian Ocean can pass over the parched eastern lowlands to dump generous amounts of rain on the fertile western highlands. The famine of 1984-85, revealed by BBC reporter Michael Buerk, was actually two separate famines, one in Tigray, in the north, the other in Somali, in the south-east.

Two main rains sustain the people of Ethiopia, the belg in spring and the kiremt, which usually start in July. Both are influenced by variations in sea-surface temperature. The El Niño phenomena in the eastern Pacific usually bring droughts to Ethiopia, and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the current El Niño will strengthen over the next six months. The belg has failed for two years running now, while the kiremt started three weeks late this summer and the amount of rainfall when they did come was below normal. Aid agencies fear that the season could end early, or, equally bad, produce delayed downpours just when farmers need dry weather for the harvest. Even if the kiremt ends on time in October, some crops may not reach maturity because of the late planting.

Ethiopia is overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture, and some 90 per cent of its crops are watered by nature rather than by man-made irrigation systems. During droughts, farmers and nomadic herders tend to sell off their assets to buy food, leaving them with nothing when the next growing season begins. It can take three to five years for pastoral tribes to rebuild their herds.

Although Ethiopia is particularly hard hit, drought has also affected neighbouring countries. Resources in Somali are under additional strain because nomadic tribesmen from Somalia and Kenya have driven unusually large numbers of cattle across the border in search of water and pasture. Estimates of the number of cattle coming into the country range from 95,000 to 200,000.

The spike in global food prices in 2008 exacerbated a worsening situation, hitting the urban poor particularly hard. While they have fallen back this year, the price for grains in the markets of Adis Ababa are still some 50 per cent higher than their average in the four years to 2007.

The Ethiopian rulers are acutely aware of the danger of famine, not least to itself. Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed a year after the 1973 famine and the Derg military junta led by Lt Col Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991 after a civil war driven in part by the 1984-85 famine. While most other countries with food shortages allow charities to distribute food, Ethiopia’s government insists that the bulk of food aid must pass through its hands.

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[The Nomad]

35 million Ethiopians or about 44% of the total population are undernourished according to a report released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organaization (FAO). The report which refers the data from 2004 to 2006, shows a progress for Ethiopia in reducing the percentage of malnourished people from 71% in 1990-92 to 44% in 2004-06. The country still has one of the largest proportion of malnourished people in the world, but the report shows a marked decrease in the percentage of malnutrition prevalence. This compares to 30% malnutrition prevalence in Kenya and 66% in Eritrea, which has the second highest malnutrition percentage in the world after Congo (D.R). The DRC was the worst affected, followed by Burundi, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Chad and Ethiopia.

[precious_dyme]

We have our own problem don't need to know about Ethiopia.

[The Nomad]

We have our own problem don't need to know about Ethiopia.

Bu-but..35 million people are starving

[precious_dyme]

We have our own problem don't need to know about Ethiopia.

Bu-but..35 million people are starving

My Allah help them if they're Muslim.

Are you Ethio?

[Crazy Cat Lady]

Let the starve, what have they done since 1984? Squandered aid money to fund a war over a few miles of rock