ICRC launches major food relief campaign

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is stepping up its emergency relief effort in Ethiopia, the organisation said last week. In a statement launching a major food relief campaign for some 700,000 people, ICRC said it would be supplying emergency food and seeds to help farmers in the regions of Oromiya, Tigray, and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State. “Living conditions here were already harsh, and have deteriorated as a result of ethnic tensions, armed violence and, in the case of Tigray, the consequences of the 1998-2000 fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea,” the ICRC said in a statement. The ICRC, which will be working with the Ethiopian Red Cross Society (ERCS), will also launch other projects such as building and repairing wells and rainfall catchments. “The whole operation has been planned in close co-operation with other humanitarian organisations working in the country and forms part of the global strategy to relieve humanitarian needs in Ethiopia,” ICRC said. Farmers in lowland areas of Oromiya have been particularly hard hit, with as much as 90 percent of their crops being wiped out by the drought. The ICRC statement said some 400,000 people would be receiving regular food aid for five to 10 months. The campaign comes as the UN’s World Food Programme said some seven million people were fed in January, which it described as a “significant achievement”. By the end of February some eight million people in the country will have received food aid – the same number of people hit by the disastrous 1984 famine. WFP said that cereal and supplementary food distributions had stabilised the nutritional situation in many of the worst-affected parts of the country. It also said that acute malnutrition rates had dropped in some of the hardest-hit areas. “While there are encouraging signs of the food crisis being generally under control, the number of those in need will increase to over 11 million people by mid-year, and there are pockets of serious needs that are additional to the requirements assessed three months ago," WFP warned.