From the London Independent, 12 Nov:
The warning is that some 14 million people will be at risk of starvation in a matter of months, dwarfing even the terrible famine of 1984-85 in which a million people are thought to have died, and which prompted Geldof to start Live Aid, the biggest charity appeal in the history of the world.
"The facts speak for themselves," the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, told BBC radio yesterday morning. "In the disaster we had in 1984- 85, the number involved was roughly a third to one half of the number of people involved now. If that was a nightmare, this will be too ghastly to contemplate." The first signs of catastrophe are there already. Across the country 84 per cent of the crop has failed. Cereal prices have rocketed, just as that of cattle and goats has plummeted as the animals become thinner and unproductive after a year-long drought that has deprived them of grazing.
People are on the move, in search of food. Reports of malnourished children - their bellies swollen and their limbs shrivelled from the wasting of hunger - are mounting. At least 10 children have starved to death in drought- stricken families who fled to Bale, one of Ethiopia's national parks, seeking refuge.
The fear is that they are only the first of many. The World Food Programme (WFP) says there is enough cereal stored in the country's strategic food reserve to last until next month - albeit by handing out rations below the level needed for a barely adequate diet. But after that stocks will run out.
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Today's NPR coverage:
Host Bob Edwards and Ken Hackett of Catholic Relief Services discuss the looming hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa. Hackett says millions of Africans already are affected by drought and could be without food by March. Making the problem worse is the AIDS pandemic. He says relief agencies desperately need more help from international organizations and donor countries.
Audio here.
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From DisasterNews.net:
The current famine condition began in 1998 when both short rains ("belg") and long rains ("meher") failed to provide sufficient saturation. A successive lack of belg rains in 1999 prevented farmers from planting the staple crops of maize and sorghum, which account for 40 percent of the total annual cereal production in Ethiopia. Substitute crops of teff and pulses were not successful due to failure of the meher rains. The next planting season is in May and June.
More than 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture as a main source of livelihood. Within that agrarian society, the nomadic lifestyle of the people who live in the region makes it difficult to achieve any measure of food security, report relief officials. According to government figures, some 70 percent of the 3.5 million people in Ethiopia's Somali region are nomads. Most of them have not diversified into farming.
Most families rely on livestock for food and income. But 90 percent of livestock in southeastern Ethiopia have died, according to the United Nations' World Food Program. Families have also sold their cattle, seed, and tools to buy food and water. People are rapidly migrating to feeding centers, sometimes walking for a week, or living on the outskirts of food centers in makeshift shelters of wood and sheeting. Overwhelming local resources of both food and medicine, hungry people are overcrowding the centers, increasing the risk of disease.
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According to OneWorld.net, lack of rain isn't the only problem:
A recent multi-agency assessment in Ethiopia estimated that the number of people requiring immediate food assistance would reach 6.3 million by the end of the year.
Just to the north, one million people in Eritrea, with whom Ethiopia fought a border war from 1998 until June 2000, are hungry too. The border lands are littered with hundreds of thousands of landmines, making agriculture extremely hazardous even when rains arrive.
The fruits of war. |
