Friday, June 06, 2008
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UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, has warned that six million children in Ethiopia are in danger of malnutrition, with 126,000 in need of urgent therapeutic care.The agency says that 3.4 million Ethiopians will need food aid over the next three months, adding that the numbers were likely to climb, as more harvests failed.
The World Food Programme projects that $147 million will be needed to feed children at risk in the country.
UNICEF has characterised this year's food shortages as "the worst since the major humanitarian crisis of 2003" when droughts led 13.2 million people to seek emergency food aid.
The agency said that consecutive failed rainy seasons, steep hikes in food prices and a lack of resources for prevention and response mechanisms were all having a devastating impact on children and families living in the drought prone districts.
At a Medicins San Frontieres centre in the Oromiya region, about 200 miles west of the capital Addis Ababa, doctors struggled to deal with large numbers of people that appeared when word got around that aid was available.
But doctors were not always able to help.
"It's quite hard to see what's happening here," Meike Steenssens told UK broadcaster Sky News in the Oromiya region.
"There are a lot of malnourished children that are arriving in a very, very severe state. In this centre we only take the children that are malnourished plus medical complications," she said.
"The ones that are only malnourished we have to send them home with food, and then there are some that don't fulfil the criteria; even if they are very thin, we have to send them home without food because we only take the very severe," she added.
Aid agency Oxfam said the failure of seasonal rains and the onset of drought had led to severe food shortages across large parts of Ethiopia.
The worst affected regions were Afar, Somali, Oromiya and SNNPR - the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region, one of nine ethnic divisions of Ethiopia.
Oxfam said many communities had yet to recover from the 2004 drought. On its web site, Oxfam described Ethiopia as "an unimaginable situation."
Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of the people live off the land and agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic product and 85 percent of exports.
Source: UNICEF, June 06, 2008