Drought-exodus creates emergency

More than 95,000 drought-affected people in Djibouti need emergency assistance, after consecutive years of poor rainfall led to an influx into urban areas and vulnerability among pastoralist populations. The World Food Programme (WFP) said in a press release that the new emergency operation would assist 95,000 people, and target rural populations suffering the effects of drought. Over the next seven months, more than 11,000 mt of supplies would be given, at the cost of US $6.5 million, said the statement, released in Djibouti on Monday. Since January 1999, the central regions of Djibouti have received less than 50 percent of the normal annual rainfall, hitting nomadic populations hard, who have often sought refuge in urban centres. Women and children have suffered in particular, WFP said. An inter-agency evaluation mission in May underlined the extreme vulnerability to drought-related malnutrition and illness among nomadic and displaced populations. “No longer able to deal with the difficult conditions... populations have poured into urban centres to benefit from aid, traditional family support, to find a job or to resort to begging”, the WFP representative in Djibouti, Fatma Samoura, said. The emergency operation would also intervene in urban centres with food-for-work programmes, and would try and stop the exodus from the rural regions. Samoura said the infrastructure in the Djibouti capital for water, health and hygiene were already overloaded because of the influx of people, including the drought-affected from neighbouring countries. She said the US had been first to respond to the situation in Djibouti, by making 5,000 mt of cereal worth US $2.8 million available to WFP, which covered 44 percent of the needs of the programme. But she called on other donors to contribute as soon as possible, saying there was need for corn soya blend, beans and oil, vegetables, sugar and iodised salt.