Twelve Million Hungry People in Ethiopia? "Unprecedented"

Baltimore, July 2, 2003 — The food crisis gripping parts of Africa rarely reaches the headlines in the U.S. but hunger there remains great and much outside assistance is urgently needed for those caught in the crisis. At Lutheran World Relief and other organizations providing aid, crisis information arrives from the field week after week, as it has for months.

"We have faced hunger for four million or even six million people before," an Ethiopian aid project manager reported this week, "but 12 million people? It is unprecedented." Ethiopian government and United Nations estimates are that 12.5 million people there are at acute risk from hunger now. That is 1.2 million more than during an inter-agency assessment mission LWR joined in March this year. The figures put Ethiopia at the top of a list of countries in the Horn of Africa and southern Africa where as many as 30 million people are in need of emergency food this year.

"Things are just burning up. I have never seen the countryside so dry," said the aid official, Isaac Bekalo, who manages an LWR partner program in Ethiopia. Bekalo has just returned from visiting LWR projects in southern Ethiopia where grain banking and village economic schemes are helping hundreds of families weather the crisis. To get there he travels through hundreds of miles where fields are parched and crops are scant.

The worst period for Ethiopia is from now until September, when harvests from erratic recent rains are expected. A partnership of Ethiopia's Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox churches and their aid agencies is distributing international food aid in bulk and supplementary rations for especially vulnerable groups like children and nursing mothers.

LWR is supporting relief efforts in Ethiopia and elsewhere, while continuing with projects like Bekalo's that are designed to break the cycle of crisis at the community level.

In Ethiopia and elsewhere, erratic rainfall this year has been the last straw, after years of intermittent drought that has magnified distribution, economic and agricultural problems for a growing population.