Ethiopian Review

The World Food Programme (WFP) says that it is running out of food for at least five million Ethiopians who rely on its help. The crisis had been exacerbated by the Ethiopian government’s decision to prioritize fertilizer imports before food aid at the crowded Djibouti port, according to it.

WFP disclosed that a combination of drought, high food prices and a drop in donor funds had all contributed to the food shortage in Ethiopia.
The government claims that to be ensuring better harvest it has prioritized the delivery of fertilizers to try to increase the next harvest rather than allow more trucks of food and grains to the country. But WFP has warned that by the end of June, it would have run out of food supply for the dependent millions.

According to WFP, there is an acute shortage of trucks, yet the Ethiopian authorities have prevented it from bringing in its own fleet from Sudan.
Barry Cane of WFP in Ethiopia said that the problem had been exacerbated by the difficulty of actually getting food into Ethiopia.

Currently, there is little prospect of food supplies arriving at the Port of Djibouti for the next five months. “We have a small refugee population here and their ration is being cut by half beginning this month. We have run out of food and people will be very hungry,” claims Cane.

“It’s a landlocked country, as you probably know, and it has one main port and that’s Djibouti. Djibouti is severely congested and once you get the food off the ships, then there’s a severe shortage of trucks to ship it around the country,” he said.

Cane added that the Djibouti Port is always congested. It is the only way into Ethiopia, the natural Ethiopian ports are in Eritrea, but Eritrea and Ethiopia are not talking to each other and have not been for some time.

“They even fought a couple of wars. And you know, after all it’s a country of 80 million people serviced by one port in a neighboring country, so it’s always, always a problem,” he added.

The government said that it had decided that fertilizers should be prioritized, which has pushed food relief down the list a bit. The government argues that the fertilizers should have high priority because without those fertilizers the situation for the 2009 harvest will be even worse than it’s shaping up to be.
Tim Costello, head of World Vision Australia, says that the situation is extremely serious.

“This isn’t crying wolf’s tears or scare tactics, we have known since March that by June the food supplies would run out, we have known with the global financial crisis that aid levels have been shrinking,” he said, adding that but this is a real crisis that the world needs to respond to.

“Well, all of us who remember the 1983/1984 Ethiopian disaster do not want to go back there, that was just horrific and the appeal by the WFP to particularly rich nations is this is critical, don’t turn away your head,” he added.

- Ethiopian Reporter