Ethiopia has launched an urgent appeal to international donors for 325 million US dollar of emergency aid, BBC online reported Thursday.
A total of 4,6 million people are now thought to need food aid, because of the drought which struck most of the country in the early part of this year. In some parts of the vast country, health centres and feeding clinics are already being overwhelmed with large numbers of severely malnourished children.
Existing stocks of food aid will cover June, but the crunch will come in July. Help is needed now, in the form of a general distribution of food to everyone in the worst affected areas, as well as extra rations for those known to be vulnerable elsewhere in the country.
But the food to do this is simply not available inside Ethiopia. The government body which deals with these crises, the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Agency (DPPA), says it needs more than 500.000 tonnes of food. It only has 118.000 tonnes.
Even if the main rains are good, the start of the next harvest in Ethiopia will not be until August or September at the very earliest.
