Eritreans so hungry they flee to Ethiopia

[Mad May]

Eritrea's drive for food self-sufficiency is opening it to allegations of grain confiscation - a charge the government denies, and which is difficult to verify.
Nineteen million people in the Horn of Africa are expected by the UN to need food aid to survive after failing rains aggravated a drought which has already destroyed crops and starved livestock.
However, Eritrea is turning down food aid.
Girma Asmerom, Eritrea's ambassador to the European Union, told the BBC "foreign food aid demonises the local people and makes them lazy".
He said the Eritrean government had its own strategy for dealing with the food shortage, including transporting grain from parts of the country which, he said, had enjoyed a bumper harvest.
But Eritreans who have fled across the border to a refugee camp in northern Ethiopia told us their government's policy was causing widespread hunger.
Farmers from Eritrea said the government had seized their harvest, paying them as little as 8% of the market value.
"The government is cheating the people," said one man, who worked for the Eritrean ministry of health until he decided to flee the country.
"They have been confiscating the food and what the farmers have grown and now they are taking the farmers' land so the farmers don't now have the jobs to do. This is the situation in Eritrea."
Like all the Eritreans we met at Mai-Aini camp, he asked us not to publish his name or take a photo in which he could be identified, fearing repression for his family back home.
"We have no freedom, no human rights, nothing," said one woman.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8428492.stm

[nomadicwarlord]

And Ethiopians are fleeing to Yemen. Horn of Africa is doomed.

[Gara Man]

The horn of africa region should be renamed as 'the horn of hungry people'

[Oxidant]

Eritrea will be the first self-sufficient state of the Horn Africa region by 2012. Give the country time.