Widespread food shortages

Sister Negest Suim runs the therapeutic feeding centre at the referral hospital in Mentefera, the main town of Debub Province, a major food-producing area south of the Eritrean capital, Asmara. On 6 May, when IRIN visited the hospital, seven children were being tended by their mothers in Sr Negest's ward. All from far away villages, the children looked sickly. "In the past two months, lots of severely malnourished children were brought here from all over the region," Sr Negest told IRIN. "Mothers bring them when they are already seriously emaciated. The children usually suffer from diarrhoea and often from kwashiorkor." One of the mothers, 21-year-old Niema Hassan, from Maladmanta village, had walked half a day and travelled 60 km by bus to get to the hospital. Her six-month-old twins had refused to eat and looked very ill. "We don't have enough to eat," she said. "We have no animals and my husband is in the army. We get just 8 kg of food aid for each of us every month." Aid workers said shortages of food aid compounded with the effects of drought had caused widespread hunger in Eritrea. According to the UN Children's Agency (UNICEF), 40 percent of all households in Eritrea are headed by women (who face problems similar to Niema's). Christian Balslev-Olesen, the UNICEF representative in Eritrea, said: "There is almost no other country where maternal health is as bad as here." Malnutrition among pregnant and lactating mothers, he added, stood above 40 percent. RISING MALNUTRITION According to a country-wide nutrition survey conducted by UN agencies and the government in June 2004, acute malnutrition in Eritrea ranged from 10 percent to 20 percent, depending on the area. Based on last year's crops assessment, the UN Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) predicted that Eritrea would face a food deficit of 431,000 mt in 2005. This takes into account 108,000 mt of local production and 30,000 mt of commercial imports, including government imports and other informal sources. Out of a population of 3.8 million, about 2.3 million people in Eritrea need food assistance. Of these, 600,000 are urban poor, who rarely benefit from distributions and subsist by buying limited amounts of bread at subsidised prices. The remaining 1.7 million are drought-affected peasants, internally displaced persons from Eritrea's war against Ethiopia from 1998 to 2000, returnees who had fled into Sudan during Eritrea's 30-year war for independence and people who were expelled from Ethiopia because they were Eritrean citizens. With the lean season starting - when farmers would traditionally survive on the last bits of their harvests and pastoralists would pray for rains to replenish grazing pastures - the state-run Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission (ERREC) said it planned to stretch available food aid as long as possible. "Until June we will live purely on carryover stocks from last year," Techlemichael Weldegiorgis, who is in charge for ERREC's operations, told IRIN. "As a result, we can only reach 1.2 million out of the 2.3 million needy so far. "And even for those, we had to cut rations to 60 percent of the 2,400 kcal which are required by WHO [World Health Organization] standards," he added. According to WHO, 2,400 kcal is the minimum food energy intake necessary for human health. Peter Vochten, UN World Food Programme (WFP) planning officer, told IRIN: "The problem is that due to pledging cycles, shipments usually don't arrive when the needs are highest. The hunger season starts in May but we expect the first shipments to arrive only in June. That delays distributions." MEAGER RESPONSE TO CAP According the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the CAP - a mechanism through which the UN and its partners ask for funding from donors - did not receive the usual response. As of May, only 19.9 percent of the $157 million that was requested by Eritrea in the CAP had been funded. At the same time last year, 42 percent had been secured. "If donor response does not improve, malnutrition rates will remain high," Vochten said. Marco Luigi Corsi, programme coordinator for UNICEF, noted: "In the country, an average of 15 percent of the children are severely malnourished. According to WHO, this is emergency level, which would demand blanket supplementary feeding." UNICEF, however, did not have enough funds to intervene and alleviate the situation as required. "There is no excuse for the international community not to aid," Balslev-Olesen said. "Eritrea has a culture of non-corruption and a transparent distribution system." "If funding does not come in," he added, "many people will need to be treated in therapeutic feeding centres. This is 10 times more expensive than providing them with supplementary feeding. Right now we would like to include 150,000 people in supplementary-feeding programmes." Aid workers also complained that rations were diluted by traditional sharing mechanisms and by poor targeting at the community level, where local officials decide who gets how much food aid and who does not. COPING MECHANISMS As a result of four consecutive years of drought and lack of supplies, the price of cereals continues to rise. At the same time, prices for livestock have been steadily falling. Sources said livestock, the traditional piggy bank of pastoralists and farmers was suffering from lack of pasture and water. In Gash Barka near the Ethiopian border, for example, farmers could only keep their herds alive by buying fodder imported from Sudan. For this they have to sell some of the animals. Marco Falcone, emergency coordinator of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), warned that the coping mechanisms of the rural population were being fast eroded. Another worry was the lack of 5,000 mt of seeds needed during the planting season, which is almost starting, he added. According to FAO, seed shortage would have a damaging impact on future harvests. According to UNICEF, which supplies clean water to communities, one of the biggest problems was the lack of commitment by donors to solve the serious water shortage. "We are afraid that polluted water is going to be the main killer. So far only 17 percent of the $5 million we requested is funded," Balslev-Olesen said. Macleod Nyirongo, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Eritrea, appealed to the donor community to step up their assistance. "Timing is the number-one problem," Nyirongo told IRIN. "The overall amount provided is also not good enough. People are not dying, but the cumulative amount of suffering shown in malnutrition levels is clearly not acceptable."