More than 3 Million Face Hunger in Ethiopia - UN

[nosmokes]

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ADDIS ABABA - With hunger in Niger grabbing world attention, the United Nations urged donors on Wednesday not to forget Ethiopia, where it said more than 3 million people need emergency food aid this year.

In a country notorious for the famine that killed 1 million people 20 years ago, the UN World Food Programme said repeated droughts meant again children with bloated stomachs were sitting listlessly at feeding centres as gaunt parents toiled arid land.

"Scenes at some of the supplementary feeding centres, established and run by the government in southern Ethiopia, show the worst side of a hunger that remains depressingly familiar," said WFP's Ethiopia director Mohamed Diab.
© Reuters News Service 2005

In a statement released in Nairobi, Diab said the situation was not as bad as 2003, when more than 13 million people needed food aid, but that the agency and its partners were monitoring 40 "hunger spots".

Erratic rains caused small harvests this year in the Horn of Africa country of 70 million people, almost 1 million of whom WFP said would still need food aid after December's main harvest.

Before that, up to 3.3 million Ethiopians are expected to need donations to survive, it said, pushing the country's emergency food needs this year to more than 600,000 tonnes.

"Ethiopia has had five major droughts in just two decades, causing untold deaths, suffering and hardship," Diab said.

"Many families never have time to recover from one calamity before another befalls them, wiping out crops, animals and what few assets they may have managed to scrape together."


Story Date: 25/8/2005

[Kipepeo]

1. Thank you for posting this

It's so terrible - and unfortunately I think that when we (meaning our governments in well-off countries) do respond to crises like this we do so with a short-term "solution" instead of anything long-term. We use the band-aid approach and often it's too little too late and for not long enough.

Check out this article, related to the story you posted:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1210038,curpg-1.cms

This is a year of both widespread hunger and solemn promises by the rich countries. But emergency food aid is not enough. Impoverished communities in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are ripe for a “green revolution,” based on modern scientific techniques for managing soils, water, and seed varieties. Donors should lend their support by backing long-term solutions aimed at increasing food production, slowing population growth, and mitigating long-term global climate change.

Donors are rallying for food aid, but they are resisting the obvious need to help the poorest million farmers (and their four million dependants) get soil nutrients and improved seeds in time for the planting season this autumn. The cost of sending such help would be around $50 million, and the benefits would be $200 million to $300 million in increased food production next year (and hence less needed in emergency food aid).

[nosmokes]

2. yeah we never seem to see beyond sunset when it

comes to food aid, almost no one really takes a long range approach. or as is case w/ far too many of the wealthy nations there are feel good projects set up through the world bank that are ultimately designed to make money for people in power and may look good on paper but end up totally screwing the sucsistence farmer who has managed, maybe not flourished, but has managed for thousands of years until the IMF decided to improve his lot in life. a great charity, besides the obvious unicef, but a great one for sustainability is heifer international, where they place a milk cow or goats or sheep or bees or chickens with a family or entire villages and teach them how to care for them and use the animals to their advantage, breeding them and milking them and getting wool etc...