Ethiopia demands urgent food aid for 6.2 million people

By Staff Writers, Addis Ababa (AFP) Oct 22, 2009

Twenty-five years after Ethiopia’s famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government appealed Thursday for help for more than six million facing starvation. State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the drought-stricken country needed 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth 121 million dollars between now and year’s end for 6.2 million people. He said nearly 80,000 children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition and that nine million dollars were required for moderately malnourished children and women. … “We cannot make the rains come, but there is much more that we can do to break the cycle of drought-driven disaster in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” Oxfam director Penny Laurence said. “Food aid offers temporary relief and has kept people alive in countless situations, but does not tackle the underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable to disaster year-after-year.” … Average temperatures in Ethiopia are predicted to rise by 3.9 degrees celsius by 2080, Oxfam said, making drought “the norm, hitting the region in up to three in every four years in the next 25 years.”