[dehai-news] The Times: Ethiopia accused of hiding famine as millions starve - Army ‘is keeping food from rebel areas’


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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Sep 18 2008 - 06:16:26 EDT


Ethiopia accused of hiding famine as millions starve
Army ‘is keeping food from rebel areas’

A goat herder in the Ogaden desert. Herdsmen say that their children have died from eating poisonous buds from trees for lack of anything else to eat

Jonathan Rugman in Jijiga
September 18, 2008
Ethiopia has been accused of deliberately underestimating the scale of a deadly drought facing millions of its people, some of whom are being deprived of emergency food aid by the country’s military.

The humanitarian crisis, caused by three years of failed rains, currently affects about 4.6 million people, though the official number could jump to as high as 6.7 million this week.

United Nations agencies say that the real number at risk is above 8 million, an estimate disputed hotly by Addis Ababa, which is insisting on publishing a much lower figure.

“The figure has risen very substantially, maybe even doubled,” said Sir John Holmes, the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, who visited Ethiopia earlier this month. “Any government doesn’t want to be perceived as always in the position of receiving aid.”

The crisis is at its most worrying in the vast deserts of the Ogaden region, where the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says in a confidential alert to donors that it is receiving “increasing reports of hunger-related mortality”. About two million people are at risk until the main rains fall next spring – if they fall at all. The Ogaden is Ethiopia’s biggest and most remote state.

Nomadic tribes there are resorting to eating dead leaves and cactus fruit to survive the worst drought since the famines of 1984-85, when an estimated one million Ethiopians died.

A twenty-mile trek on foot into the bush revealed mediaeval mud-hut villages, where ethnic Somali herdsmen say that their children have died after eating poisonous buds from trees, for lack of anything else to eat. Others say that they depend on camel milk and meat because cattle, sheep and goats have perished in their thousands.

“I am ill and hungry,” said one man, removing his shirt to reveal his rib cage visible through taut skin. “Because of the drought we have nothing to eat. The only people who receive food are the military forces.”

The UN has raised about 60 per cent of $325 million (£181 million) it is seeking in emergency relief for Ethiopia and says that it is suffering a shortfall of about 300,000 tonnes of aid.

The WFP has told donors that it blames Ethiopia’s “delays in recognising the extent of need” for causing the rapid depletion of existing food stocks. But a Channel 4 News investigation tonight claims that the army has withheld food from villages in the Ogaden deliberately as part of a “scorched earth” policy against separatist rebels of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).

Herdsmen in villages almost completely cut off from the outside world said that many of their animals had been killed by Ethiopian soldiers, who also deprived them of water.

“We walk for eight hours to collect water,” said Abdi, a villager about three hours from Jijiga, the regional capital. “Then the military take the water from us. They say the rebels pass through our villages and that we give them supplies. But what can we give? We are dying of hunger. We have nothing to give to our own children.”

The UN says that it has negotiated with the Ethiopian army for the military’s role in food distribution to be kept to a minimum. “If there is a situation where food is taken by the military, we protest,” said Mohammed Diab, the WFP’s Ethiopia director.

However, a confidential investigation by USAid, the US Government’s disaster relief agency, complained in March that “literally hundreds of areas . . . have neither been assessed nor received any food assistance”, with “populations we met terrorised by the inability to access food”.

“This situation would be shameful in any other country,” the report concludes. “The US Government cannot in good conscience allow the food operation to continue in its current manifestation.” The US is spending more than £230 million on food aid for Ethiopia this year but is hamstrung from being too critical in public; Washington sees Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, as an ally in the War on Terror after Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2005, which ousted an Islamist administration from power.

Britain has doubled its annual aid to Ethiopia in the last three years to £130 million, including £15 million this summer through the UN’s Humanitarian Response Fund, while Save the Children (SCF) is halfway through a campaign to raise £10 million for the country. Two SCF workers were expelled from the Ogaden last year amid allegations – rejected by SCF – that they had diverted food to ONLF rebels. The British charity abandoned a full-scale feeding programme, fearing supplies could be diverted.

Jonathan Rugman’s report on Ethiopia’s drought is on tonight’s Channel 4 News at 7pm.

Food price rises push 14m to the brink of starvation
Tim Albone in Fendi Ajersai and Jack Malvern
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4553673.ece
Rapidly rising global food costs have contributed to the worst hunger crisis in East Africa for eight years, with at least 14 million people at risk of malnutrition, aid agencies said yesterday.

In Ethiopia, the worst-affected country in the region, the Government said that 4.6 million people faced starvation, but aid agencies claimed that the true figure was closer to 10 million.

Drought has worsened food shortages, and Oxfam said that the number of acute malnutrition cases had reached its highest level since the droughts of 2000, when mortality rates peaked at more than six people per 10,000 per day. The official definition of a famine is more than four deaths per 10,000 per day.

Ethiopian farmers said that the crisis was caused by the absence of the Belg rains, which were due in February and March. “It’s really hard. People are eating whatever they can find,” said Gemeda Worena, 38, the tribal head of Fendi Ajersai, a village in southern Ethiopia where six children died in one week this month. “We hadn’t had rain for the last eight months. We had to buy water to save our lives, but now we have nothing.”

Mr Worena said that the price of maize had risen fourfold in the past year, a severe blow for villagers with what little money they had saved.

Surprisingly, when The Times visited the region, the fields were alive with maize and most afternoons a warm rain fell. “Here the problem is acute,” said Jean de Cambry, the emergency co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in southern Ethiopia. “It is very surprising and very strange, because everything is so green. But food stocks at household level are empty or close to empty.”

The United Nations World Food Programme is providing emergency food assistance to 3.2 million people in Ethiopia and 900,000 people in northern Kenya, where poor rains and political violence have disrupted food production.

The programme is also feeding 707,000 people in the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda, where erratic rainfall has prevented 90 per cent of the population from planting for the current growing season, and aims to give help to 115,000 people in Djibouti, just under a quarter of the tiny country’s population.

The UN says that 2.6 million people in Somalia are in need of food assistance as a result of drought, conflict, hyperinflation, and high food and fuel prices. The World Food Programme believes that the figure will rise to 3.5 million in December.

Chris Leather, a food security expert for Oxfam, said: “We haven’t seen such high rates of acute malnutrition, of above 20 per cent, in as many places as we’re seeing right now, since 2000.” He said that 3 per cent of those found to have acute malnutrition had a high risk of dying if there was no intervention.

In Fendi Ajersai, the haunting wails of women paying their respects to the dead have become more frequent in recent months. When The Times visited this month villagers were mourning the latest victim of the famine, Tariky Gamedo, a football-loving, 13-year-old boy.

“He was my brother,” cried Basha Dekeo, 25, as her father tried to hold her flailing arms, “He is gone.”

Mr Worena said: “We have lost six kids this week.”

Despite the recent rainfalls and the apparent lushness of the countryside, the future does not look much better. Next month the harvest takes place, but many expect it to be smaller than is needed. Planting has been done largely by hand because so much livestock died before the rains arrived. The animals that survived are so skinny that when they can work the pace is pitifully slow.

Accurate numbers of how many people have died of hunger are impossible to find, with the Ethiopian Government seemingly determined to cover up the true extent of the problem.

Access to areas affected by famine is strictly controlled, with journalists needing permits. At one feeding centre, government officials refused The Times permission to photograph or film it.

At a feeding centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières in the town of Senbeta Shalla, the severity of the problem was clear to see. More than a thousand people queued for food and medical aid, and many had stick-thin limbs and swollen bellies, their desperation clear to see.

“The rains failed, everybody lost their crops,” Gamtou Defso, 70, a farmer, said. “We are just eating anything we find on the ground. I am hungry and I feel really sick . . . We don’t have any food to eat.”

Mieke Staanssens, the field co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, said: “They don’t even have the energy to cry.”

The hunger crisis

8 out of 10 workers in Ethiopia are involved in agricultural activities

15 droughts in Ethiopia since 1965

50% of Ethiopia’s total goods and services are made up of agriculture

1 million people starved to death in the 1984-85 famine

Source: The International Food Policy Research Institute, The Red Cross,countrystudies.us


goat-herder385_400757a.jpg

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