Ethiopia: The Australian government should urgently contribute aid money towards Ethiopia's worst drought in 50 years and the United Nations needs to "raise the global alarm," a charity says.
Save the Children is calling on Canberra to "immediately" spend $20 million towards Ethiopia's drought response.
Failed seasonal rains across much of the Horn of Africa nation compounded by the El Nino effect has caused widespread crop and livestock losses in the agrarian nation.
The drought is eroding harvests of everything from corn to sorghum, compounding a food shortage for a country where 30 per cent of the population subsists on less than $US1.25 ($1.76) a day.
Already sub-Saharan Africa's biggest wheat consumer, Ethiopia will need $US1.1 billion to buy food for more than 18 million people this year, according to a report by the government and humanitarian partners including the UN. The government estimates 10.1 million people need food aid; roughly 10 per cent of the population while an estimated 400,000 children are at risk of suffering severe acute malnutrition.
On top of that, Save the Children estimates 350,000 babies are expected to be born in drought-affected communities over the next six months when Ethiopia's "hunger season peaks".
"Australia has a proud history of giving generously following humanitarian crises, including committing more than $140 million following the East Africa food crisis in 2011," says John Graham, the charity's Ethiopia's chief executive officer.
"However, they are yet to shed a cent directly to the drought response in Ethiopia."
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson says $6.4 million of Australia's "unearmarked funding" to the United Nations World Food Program was allocated to Ethiopia by the UN.
But the internationally agreed $2 billion response cost is less than one-third funded, Mr Graham said.
"What we really lack this year … is the support from the international community at a level that is commensurate with the disaster we're facing," he said during a tour of Ethiopia's drought-affected North Wollo region.
In the hard hit Afar region, Medina Humed is one of a dozen mothers gathered at a small health post feeding their "moderate acute malnourished" babies with emergency food.
Her nine-month-old son Ahmed Adbu "had diarrhoea and the flu" but his health is improving with regular feeds of a French-made nutritional paste.
The Ethiopian government insisted in December that no one has died from the drought but deaths from malnourishment-linked diseases are common.
Save the Children ranks Ethiopia's drought as a "category one" crisis with only Syria's crisis sharing the same classification.
"The UN has not categorised this in their most serious category and that's the kind of thing that we need if we're going to head this off before it gets much worse," Mr Graham said.
When the infamous 1984 drought shocked the world with images of famine and sparked Bob Geldof's Live Aid response, Ethiopia was led by a communist military government fighting a rebel insurgency in some of the drought-affected areas. The famine was as much politically created as it was environmental.
Farmers in Ethiopia usually harvest two grain crops a year, and problems started during the smaller "belg" season, when rains were about half the average from March to May. Erratic precipitation throughout the summer mean that the main "meher" harvest in most eastern areas also will be well-below average, according to the US Agency for International Development's Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
The country is normally Africa's third-largest grain producer, after Nigeria and Egypt.
"It's a really scary situation," Mario Zappacosta, an economist at the UN's Food & Agriculture Organisation, said from Juba, South Sudan. "In part of the country, there were two bad seasons in a row."
Culled from SMH
No comments:
Post a Comment