Two million face serious food shortage

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Friday that "exceptionally dry weather" was causing serious food shortages and affecting millions of farmers and pastoralist in eastern, northern and southern Ethiopia. In a statement, the agency said that the dry weather had been due to the partial failure of the 'Belg' rains (February to May) and a late start of the main 'Meher' rains (June to September). It said a monthly average of two million Ethiopians had already been identified as being in need of food aid for the second half of the year, but the poor rainfall meant that another two million would also need similar help. WFP said that it, donors and the government conducted several joint inter-agency assessment missions in June and July, and found that in one of the worst affected areas - the Afar region - at least one-third of the 1.2 million people living there were "in dire need of immediate food assistance" through December. Even though there were no reports of widespread "acute malnutrition" in Afar, WFP said, the nutritional situation of children, women and the elderly was deteriorating rapidly. "A major step has to be taken to save the remaining breeding livestock from being lost. More food aid should be provided to the population, which in some areas is already migrating in search of food and water," Paul Turnbull, the WFP emergency officer, was quoted as saying after returning from a fact-finding mission to the Afar Regional State. WFP said there were other areas in the country requiring "substantial amounts" of extra food aid due to the poor rains, such as the eastern parts of Roomy Regional State's lowlands, several areas of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Regional State, and the northern part of the Somali Regional State. It said that countrywide there was an estimated shortfall of at least 100,000 mt of food to the end of the year. "WFP is appealing to the donor community to respond quickly with food aid donations to avert this serious situation from developing into widespread hunger and starvation," Turnbull said.