‘Belg’ failure deepens food crisis

In January, the government launched its largest food aid appeal since 1992 for eight million people affected by drought and displaced by the conflict with Eritrea. Yet, already, with the ‘belg’ rains due in February and early March having failed almost completely, the number of people in need of food aid is expected to rise again, possibly to 10 million, the NGO Save the Children Fund (SCF) reported on Monday. “People are more vulnerable to food shortages today than they were at the time of the 1984-‘85 famine,” it added. The two areas particularly badly affected are the highly-populated northern and eastern highlands, including North and South Wello, South Tigray, North Shoa, East and West Hararghe. In the south, Konso, Derashe, Burji and North Omo are especially vulnerable, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) reported on Tuesday. There is “an advanced emergency” reported in Gode and other parts of Somali Region, and in the Borena and Bale zones of Oromiya Region.

There are already “a significant number of deaths, certainly in the hundreds” being recorded in the Somali zone and other southern parts of Ethiopia, according to humanitarian sources. Hugh Palmer, director of the Bureau of Humanitarian Response at USAID was moved to order an urgent airlift of 25 mt of high-energy food (from an overall pledge of more than 400,000 mt of food) after seeing the situation in southern Ethiopia last week, and hearing from health officials how 53 children under five years had died in one week in Gode alone. “The dimensions of the food crisis in Ethiopia now appear to be growing larger, and the problems greater. The opportunity to avert a massive human disaster now rests even more precariously upon the ability of government and donors to not only fund and carry out the current emergency efforts, but to expand them to meet needs that are substantially greater and more urgent,” FEWS warned on Tuesday. Early analysis of the potential impact of the total failure of the ‘belg’ rains suggested that food aid requirements could rise from 836,000 mt to almost 1.3 million mt, it added.