NEW YORK (UN News Center) – Drought-hit Ethiopians are facing a worsening food situation as the cost of maize soars nearly three-fold in some areas of the Horn of Africa country compared to last year, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) cautioned today.
[The U.N. needs to come out and tell the truth. The current famine in Ethiopia has nothing to do with drought. It is a man-made famine by the US- UK- and World Bank-financed dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi that is purposely hiding and covering up the problem as the U.K. officials have finally admitted today.]
Migration by people from rural to urban areas in search of food is increasing, it noted, and aid agencies have identified critical malnutrition. A rapid assessment team said it found grave water and pasture shortages in some areas.
Due to reduced rations resulting from breaks in the pipeline have led to reduced rations, whose distribution began in July and will continue until December, OCHA said that it anticipates increased malnutrition and a rise in child labour and begging.
The Office also warned that without adequate October-December rains, food insecurity will continue will into next year.
Earlier this week, OCHA appealed for more than $265 million to fund relief operations in Ethiopia for the next three months to meet the widening scale of the crisis, with some 6.4 million people now estimated to need urgent assistance.
It reported that a recent joint assessment by Ethiopian authorities and the international humanitarian community found that an extra 1.8 million people have been hit hard by the crisis since the last assessment in June.
The biggest increase has been in the country’s south-east, known as the Somali region, where the number of people requiring emergency food aid has almost doubled to 1.9 million since June.
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FORUM | 2 Comments
If UN were relevant the economic and political turmoil going on in the world wouldn’t have been ignored. It seems UN worn the world or try to take action after it is too late—case in point—Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and so on and so on. I am afraid, countless number of Ethiopians must have died of starvation for UN calmly trying to worn the world. How many people have to die for a lack of piece of bread and a cup of water!! In order the world to take action. MY heart ache for my people and my country. Ethiopia deserves better than what it is getting.
[Reply]
October 18th, 2008 at 1:23 PM
Quoting from Alan Greenspan’s book, The Age of Turbulence:
“..While the debate over property rights and democracy will doubtless persist, I was taken with an observation made by Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winner in economics: ‘In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial
famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look.’ With the media in authoritarian regimes tending toward selfcensorship, market-interventionist policies—the most prevalent cause of disrupted distribution of food— go unreported and uncorrected until too late. ….”
[Reply]
November 16th, 2008 at 6:04 AM