Ethiopia gripped by famine, experts say

World-renowned disaster experts on Friday declared the devastating crisis that is crippling Ethiopia a famine. The team, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), asserted that the magnitude of the crisis would ensure the emergency continued into next year. “You have a widespread livelihood crisis leading to emergency levels of malnutrition, morbidity, mortality, with alarming implications for destitution,” said expert Sue Lautze, of the acclaimed Feinstein International Famine Centre, based in the US. “That for us is a famine,” she stated. She also warned that the hard-hit population now faces the “extreme risk” of a major epidemic like malaria breaking out as the country begins to emerge from the famine. “Famines have a tendency to be followed by pestilence,” she told journalists in the capital Addis Ababa, at the launch of a 240-page report on the emergency. The team warned that massive shipments of food aid were not the only answer and had failed to avert the crisis engulfing the impoverished country. Lautze said too much emphasis has been placed on food, at the expense of key areas such as health, agriculture and water, which in turn had exacerbated the crisis. “We have a food crisis leading to destitution and we have a health crisis that is leading to emergency mortality – a very alarming situation,” she said. The key to tackling the emergency, she stressed, was to look at the livelihoods of the impoverished people in the country. “The donors have come though on this crisis,” Lautze added. “We have all the resources that we thought we would need, and yet we have crises that we are unable to control." “We have emergency levels of malnutrition, emergency levels of morbidity and sickness, and emergency levels of mortality. “Those are disasters and yet we have all of the resources that the government has asked for so what is wrong with the system, what’s missing, why are we facing crises?” she said. Among the team's key recommendations are protecting families from becoming poorer, preventing further destruction of the environment, and boosting early warning systems in areas of health and agriculture. [Click here for earlier story: New report criticises response to food crisis]