Eritreans face famine
2003-06-11 18:54
Asmara - UN and local officials have launched an urgent new appeal for aid to head off a looming famine in Eritrea blamed on drought and war and threatening more than half the residents of this tiny Horn of Africa country.
"The situation is critical," said Simon Nhongo, the local UN coordinator for humanitarian affairs who helped make the appeal on Tuesday at a press conference here.
Less than half - 43% - of funding requested in appeals last year has been met, he said.
And only about a month of food stocks remain.
This has left serious shortfalls in a region heavily dependent on agriculture but subject to fickle rains and volatile politics that has led to sporadic fighting and displaced populations.
"The next few months are very critical in terms of quantity of summer rains," said UN deputy emergency relief coordinator Carolyn McAskie, who travelled here this week for the appeal.
The region has two rainy seasons, a short season beginning in February and running through April and a long one beginning in June and ending in September.
Shortages
The last one was missed and the June rains have not yet started.
This has added to concern over a situation that some regional officials have complained is not getting the attention it deserves - given its magnitude - compared to the south of the continent, where food shortages have come under the international spotlight.
In real terms, some 2.038 million Eritreans, or 62% of the population, do not have enough food, according to an updated report issued here this week that blames both serious drought - the area's worst since 1985 - and fallout from Eritrea's fierce war with Ethiopia in 1998-2000 that forced thousands of people to flee their homes.
The report said of the $160m sought by UN and Eritrean authorities, "only $69.2m has been pledged to date, leaving a shortfall of $90.7m", said Musa Bungudu, Eritrea's deputy coordinator for humanitarian affairs.
Late
Nhongo said the "donor response has been low and late".
"The food currently in stocks will run out sometime in July or August," he warned, saying only 60% of people in need receive food aid, and then only 60% of necessary rations.
The UN envoy McAskie, who flew in from New York on Monday for a two-day visit here before heading on to Ethiopia and then Kenya, conceded that donor nations were stretched.
"There is an awful lot of things on the donor plate right now. There is a limit of how much money we can get out of the same donors," she told reporters here.
Neighbouring Ethiopia - from whom Eritrea won independence only a decade ago after two years of fierce, World War I-style trench warfare that left tens of thousands killed and wounded - is also suffering.
UN food officials say an estimated 12.6 million people there are in need of food aid. As in Eritrea, matters are dire for many children who are suffering from malnutrition in this nation of 65 million, half of whom live below the poverty line.
The combined figures mean there are about as many people facing starvation in the Horn area as there are in the whole of famine-hit southern Africa, where 15 million people across six countries could die of hunger. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA