7.7 million Ethiopians need food
ADDIS ABABA: The number of Ethiopians who need food aid as a result of drought has surged to 7.7 million from 5.6 million at the beginning of the year, an official said yesterday.
In January, the United Nations appealed for more than $US900 million ($NZ1.3 billion) in aid for the Horn of Africa country, which has been hit by repeated droughts.
Some areas of Ethiopia’s Oromiya, Amhara and SNNP regions are now facing severe water shortages, in addition to areas where the main harvests had failed this year, said Debebe Zewdie, head of public relations at the National Disaster Risk Management Commission.
‘‘The number has risen to more than 7.7 million people; 432,000 tonnes of food is needed until the end of the year,’’ he told stateowned Ethiopian News Agency.
Although it has one of the highest growth rates in Africa, Ethiopia’s economy still depends heavily on farming, which employs threequarters of the workforce in the nation of more than 90 million people.
Last year, failed spring and summer rains worsened by the El Nino weather phenomenon affected 10.2 million people.
Altogether, almost 13 million people across the Horn of Africa region require aid, including 2.7 million in Kenya, 2.9 million in Somalia and 1.6 million in Uganda, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
In Somalia, the UN has warned that the country risks a repeat of the 2011 famine, which killed about 260,000 people.