WUNRN
As
Famine Looms in Ethiopia, Only the Neediest Get Food Aid.
Aid
workers must now choose who's the most malnourished, and experts say the crisis
could become as bad as the infamous 1984 famine.
_____________________________________________________________
Who gets in? A woman breaks down in tears after arguing with
a guard at a health center set up in Hadero, Ethiopia to treat hungry women and
children affected by a severe drought.
Nicholas Benequista
|
June 27, 2008
Hadero,
Ethiopia - –
One by one, the children are placed on a scale hanging from a makeshift wooden
stand.
The mothers
look pleadingly at the Doctors Without Borders aid worker, but he keeps his
eyes on his clipboard, tallying the figures that determine whether each child
is sick enough to eat today.
The
scales in a rural clinic in Hadero, Ethiopia, are the latest indicator of the
severity of the global food crisis.
There is
only enough medicine and high-energy Plumpy'Nut peanut paste for the most
severe cases. Outside, hundreds of hungry women and children throng the gates,
desperate to go through the same brutal selection process, pushed back by
guards brandishing sticks to clear a path for the next in line.
In this
African nation, about 10 million people, more than 12 percent of the
population, are now in need of emergency food aid after a drought wiped out
harvests. But because grain is now twice as expensive as a year ago – if it is
available at all – there is not enough food in Ethiopia to feed everyone in
need.
Some aid
workers are concerned that the combination of forces could force the country
into the worst crisis since the infamous Ethiopian famine that killed an
estimated 1 million people and was brought home to millions of television
viewers across the world in the mid-1980s.
'Prioritizing'
aid
Aid workers
and government officials are thus forced to "prioritize," a harsh but
necessary part of any relief effort, but rarely as grim a task as in Ethiopia
at present.
"People
don't know yet how widespread and severe the world hunger crisis is," says
David Beckmann, president of Washington D.C.-based Bread for the World.
"The gruesome things now happening in Ethiopia may be the first example of
a country that's being pushed into a humanitarian crisis partly because of bad
weather, but partly because of the high price of food and the high price of
fuel."
The World
Food Program, for example, is supposed to be doing its part by procuring
emergency rations sufficient for 4.6 million Ethiopians, but because of rising
expenses it only has the grain, oil, and corn-soya blend for about half that
number.
Not
much food left to buy
Ethiopia's
foreign-funded welfare system, the Productive Safety Net Program, may get
around the food shortage by simply handing out cash to some of its
beneficiaries who need extra help this year due to the drought. But even with
cash in hand, some worry whether there will be any food at all left to buy.
The
shortfall in this so-called preventative component of the relief effort means
that clinics like the one in Hadero could be thronged by even larger crowds of
women and children in mortal need of intensive, and expensive, treatment.
"It is
quite important to inject food rapidly into the community," says François
Colas, country director in Ethiopia for the Belgian chapter of Doctors without
Borders. "As long as food isn't distributed, we will see people falling
into severe malnutrition."
The
Ethiopian government said earlier this month that 75,000 children are already
in peril from the drought.
Most are now
in the country's southern lowlands, though the crisis is spreading to the
northern highlands.
Drought-stricken
zones have been divided into six priority levels, depending on the prevalence
of malnourishment.
The largest
aid efforts are now under way in areas in the top two categories.
How
villages bear the hunger
Still, the
crisis does not conform to administrative boundaries, and on the edges of aid
operations, some villages are quietly bearing their hunger.
In the
Ethiopian village of Kamecho, in one area on the cusp of a priority zone, a
young boy jogs along the muddy path, dutifully pointing out the households with
malnourished children.
Word spreads
that a foreigner has arrived at this remote spot, accessible only by a
footbridge.
Parents emerge
from huts and fields carrying listless children appear from their huts and
fields carrying listless children. One woman marches to the center of the
gathering crowd with a bundle in her arms.
She throws
the threadbare blanket to the ground and holds up her frightened daughter, the
child's lip quivering as her eyes dart from face to face, her bony legs
swinging limply below her swollen belly.
She had
brought her daughter to a nearby clinic for help, but when the staff discovered
that the child was not only malnourished but afflicted with tuberculosis, they
referred the child to a hospital 34 miles away in Hosaina.
One staff
member, speaking anonymously, says that every week the clinic refers as many as
six cases of malnourished children with complications, knowing that most will
never make it.
"We
refer the kids to the hospital in the hope that they will of course go and be
healed, but that is usually not the case, and it is horrible," he says.
Neighbors
tell a similar story in Kamecho.
Unable to
afford transportation to the hospital, they returned to plow their fields in
hope that their children will survive another two months until the next
harvest.
The Irish
organization Concern says that help may come sooner if it secures the resources
to set up operations in the area.
All
together, aid operations in Ethiopia will need at least another $300 million
this year to fill the shortfall.
The US,
Britain, and other countries are likely to step up, but even if these donors
provide more funds tomorrow, it will take as long as eight weeks to procure
food internationally.
And once
reaches the country, truckers are in short supply to distribute the aid,
sometimes canceling delivery contracts at the last minute as more lucrative
opportunities arise.
Until more
aid arrives, government agencies and international organizations are likely to
continue to concentrate their resources in the neediest areas – weighing the
indicators by the much more convenient statistical scale.
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