10 Million Need Food Aid In Ethiopia

ABC News (Australia): Ethiopian drought: 10m need food amid worst drought in 50 years, Save the Children says


I have never seen dust so thick. It cakes itself onto my boots and embeds itself within every fibre of my clothes. I can taste it in the air.

This is eastern Ethiopia in the midst of the nation's worst drought in 50 years.

So far more than 10 million people are in need of food aid, while 400,000 children are expected to suffer severe malnutrition this year.

Everywhere people are desperate and in need of help. Some communities have not seen rain in more than two years.

This week I travelled out to the Somali region of Ethiopia, where hundreds of thousands of livestock have perished from the lack of food and water.

These pastoral lands were once green and lush, but now they kick up plumes of dust with the slightest breeze.

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Update: Visiting drought-hit region of Ethiopia, Ban urges support to Government-led humanitarian efforts (UN News Centre)

WNU Editor: This is going to get worse. My contacts in the UN told me a few weeks ago that they can see a mass migration of people in the next few months from this region. As to where they will go .... they are not sure.

Most African Famies Are A Result Of Government Policies, And Not The Weather

The Hazards Of Doing Good -- Wall Street Journal

From Live Aid in the mid-1980s to today, Western attempts to help famine-plagued Ethiopia have had little effect. Peter Gill explains why in "Famine and Foreigners." William Easterly reviews.

If it were possible to sum up in one sentence Ethiopia's struggles with famine over the past quarter-century, I'd suggest this: It's not the rains, it's the rulers. As Peter Gill makes clear in "Famines and Foreigners," his well-turned account of the country's miseries since the 1984-85 famine and the Live Aid concert meant to relieve it, drought has not been as devastating to Ethiopians as their own autocratic governments.

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My Comment: I completely agree with Peter Gill's conclusions. The denial of food has always been used as a weapon by African tribes and governments for years. Unfortunately, many NGOs and western media news services look at famine as an unfortunate act of nature rather than a deliberate act of war .... that is why their interventions have so far been ineffective.

Ethiopians Braced For New Famine

From The Telegraph:

Last year, the rains were good. Teagistu Gansamo filled the fertile earth of her half-acre plot with maize and bean seeds and, for months afterwards, she and her five children ate well.

A year later, she was squatting on a grubby pink blanket outside a rural health centre deep in Ethiopia's south, holding her listless infant son Harony tightly to her chest.

She walked eight miles through the heat of the day to bring Harony here to Boricha, 180 miles south of the capital Addis Ababa.

When nurses admitted him, into a ward crammed with 38 other severely malnourished babies, the boy with the narrow face and weak smile weighed less than a stone.

Read more ....

News on Ethiopia From Other Sources:
As famine looms in Ethiopia, only the neediest get food aid -- Christian Science Monitor
Ethiopia’s political landscape worrying -- The East African
New famine threat for Ethiopia -- New Scotsman

My Comment: The African tragedy continues.