Ethiopia has appeals for emergency food aid

Ethiopia has appealed for tonnes of emergency aid to feed 6.2 million people. Twenty-five years after more than a million people died in the country's notorious famine, today’s call came at a meeting about a prolonged drought across East Africa More than 23 million people in seven east African nations are suffering in a five-year drought, say aid workers. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) is already facing a shortfall of more than £50m worth of food for Ethiopia to the end of this year.

The drought was brought on by four years of bad harvests, and has been made worse by fighting, climate change and population growth. But this years’s rains were especially poor, said Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia's State Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development. "As a result, the number of people needing emergency assistance during the period October to December 2009, has increased to 6.2 million from 4.9 million at beginning of the year," he said. He appealed for 159,410 tonnes of food worth £73m, 11 tonnes of fortified blended food for malnourished children and women worth £5m, and £27m in non-food needs.Also today, the aid agency Oxfam called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in Ethiopia. In a report 25 years after the 1984 famine, Oxfam said that imported food aid saves lives in the short term but doesn’t to help communities weather future disasters. The Band Aids and Beyond report, asked international donors to work more towards preparing communities to prevent and deal with disasters before they strike. "Drought does not need to mean hunger and destitution," said Penny Lawrence, Oxfam's international director, who has just returned from Ethiopia. "If communities have irrigation for crops, grain stores, and wells to harvest rains then they can survive despite what the elements throw at them."

Because of the drouhght which affected he whole East African region, Oxfam last month launched a £9.5m emergency appeal for all the affected parts of the Horn of Africa, where it is suggested that 23 million people in seven countries are under threat. In both the hardest-hit south of Ethiopia and in places in the north, farmers have saidf their harvests would be totally wiped out. Some said they planned to sell their cattle, damaging their livelihoods even orer. “For the last four years these farmers have held on to hope, but each year been left with despair as the rains failed,” Fergus Conmee, Africa humanitarian manager for the Catholic aid agency Cafod told The Times newspaper. “This humanitarian crisis has pushed them on to a tightrope of survival and many farming families have been left destitute.”

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children