Jun 10, 6:56 AM EDT
By ELIAS MESERET
Associated Press
AP Photo/Elias Meseret
WARDER, Ethiopia (AP) — Ethiopia’s government is warning it will run out of emergency food aid starting next month as the number of drought victims in the East African country has reached 7.8 million.
An international delegation visited one of the worst-affected areas Friday near the border with Somalia, which suffers from widespread drought as well. Several hundred people lined the dusty road to meet the officials at the remote airstrip, while rail-thin camels and goats roamed in the bushes. Animal carcasses littered the ground.
“I came to this area after losing nearly all my goats and camels due to lack of rain,” 75-year-old Ader Ali Yusuf said quietly, wiping her cheek with her headscarf as she sat with other women observing the delegation from afar. The mother of 12 is just one of thousands of Ethiopians who have walked up to three days on foot to displacement camps for aid.
Ethiopia’s disaster relief chief Mitiku Kassa told The Associated Press that the country needs more than $1 billion for emergency food assistance. Seasonal rains have been critically small and local cattle are dying. The number of drought victims has risen by two million people in the past four months.
The risk of an acute food and nutritional disaster is “very high,” the disaster relief chief said.
The International Organization for Migration said hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, with the problem compounded as people pour into Ethiopia from Somalia.
A United Nations humanitarian envoy said donor fatigue and similar crises elsewhere have hurt aid efforts. Both Somalia and neighboring South Sudan are among four countries recently singled out by the United Nations in a $4.4 billion aid appeal to avert catastrophic hunger and famine. Already, famine has been declared for two counties in South Sudan.
“Our main concern should be for this drought in Ethiopia not to degenerate into a famine,” said the humanitarian envoy, Ahmed Al- Meraikhi. The United Nations has warned that Ethiopia’s drought will pose a severe challenge to the humanitarian community by mid-July with the current slow pace of aid.
Along with the drought, Ethiopia also faces an outbreak of what authorities call acute watery diarrhea, though critics have said the government should call it cholera instead.
“I’ve never seen the resources so poor to respond to the crisis,” the country director for aid group Save the Children, John Graham, said of the drought. “It is very worrying. These people are not going to be able to continue to survive in these dilapidated displaced people’s camps. It could get very much worse. We are also worried that some of the children affected by the drought may die.”
Ethiopia, humanitarian groups say food aid for 7.8 million to run out
Sat Jun 10, 2017 | 9:59am EDT
By Aaron Maasho | WARDER, Ethiopia
Ethiopia will run out of emergency food aid for 7.8 million people hit by severe drought by the end of this month, the government and humanitarian groups said.
Successive failed rains blamed by meteorologists on fluctuations in ocean temperatures known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) have created a series of severe back-to-back droughts in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa region.
In Ethiopia, the number of people now critically short of food is expected to rise by at least two million by next month, according to figures compiled by the government and its humanitarian partners.
Donors, international aid groups and the government say existing food aid for the current 7.8 million will run out as funds are critically short this year with Ethiopia receiving slightly more than half of the $930 million to meet requirements until July.
“We are in a dire situation,” John Aylieff, the World Food Programme’s representative in Ethiopia, said on Friday during a field trip to Warder in southeast Ethiopia, one of Ethiopia’s hardest-hit areas.
“We’ve got food running out nationally at the end of June. That means the 7.8 million people who are in need of humanitarian food assistance in Ethiopia will see that distribution cut abruptly at the end of June,” he added.
TREELESS PLAINS
Humanitarian groups fear donor fatigue is weighing on efforts to meet requirements.
Famine in northeast Nigeria, together with South Sudan, Yemen and Somalia, constitute the worst humanitarian crisis the world has faced since 1945, the U.N. said in March.
“There is donor fatigue because there are a lot of crises,” said Ahmed Al Meraikhi, the U.N. Secretary-General’s humanitarian envoy.
Addis Ababa allocated $272 million extra in 2015 and a further $109 million last year from its own coffers to deal with the drought.
However the government said it faced difficulties in sustaining similar targets this year.
“Last year, we spent a lot of money to confront this type of drought. It is very challenging,” said Mitiku Kassa, head of Ethiopia’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission.
Across the Horn of Africa, close to 17 million people need humanitarian aid due to drought, including 2.6 million in Kenya and 3.2 million in Somalia, according to the U.N.
In the treeless plains littered with makeshift plastic homes in Ethiopia’s Warder, bordering Somalia, displaced and destitute pastoralists said their entire herds had been decimated.
“We have had droughts before, but this time we have drought, diarrhea and disease,” said Ardo Yusuf, a 49-year old mother who said her entire livestock had succumbed to illness.
(Reporting by Aaron Maasho; Editing by Andrew Bolton)
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