Ethiopia mirrors others’ hunger problem as aid shrinks
MELKADIDA REFUGEE CAMP, Ethiopia — Eight years ago, Khadija Abdi fled the fighting and chaos in Somalia that killed her father and brother and made it across the border to a refugee camp in southern Ethiopia. Life isn’t so bad here, she said.
Tents have gradually been replaced by huts. She is safe, and her daughter goes to school.
The problem: There’s not enough food.
“Three times this year, rations have been cut,” Abdi, 40, said of their monthly allotment of grain, pulses, cooking oil and salt.
Beset by funding shortages, the U.N. World Food Program has reduced the daily calorie intake for the 650,000 refugees it feeds in Ethiopian camps by 20 percent, leaving them with an allowance 1,680 calories a day.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, men need 2,500 calories a day, women about 2,000.
If new funds do not come by March, the refugees will see a further drop, to about 1,000 calories a day.
Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 new refugees, mostly from war-torn South Sudan, arrive every day.
The problem is not restricted to Ethiopia. The operations of the WFP, by far the world’s biggest food provider, are under threat as global crises overwhelm donor countries’ capacity to give. Nor is it mainly a matter of donor fatigue.
The Trump administration may have threatened to cut back on humanitarian aid, but 2017 saw the most U.S. funding ever for the WFP — $2.4 billion, up from $2 billion in 2016, according to Peter Smerdon, the WFP of just for East Africa.
“It’s the huge demands that have outstripped donors’ ability to keep increasing funding,” Smerdon said.
With near-famines in South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia, as well as a string of protracted conflicts and refugee crises in Syria and Ethiopia, the need is too great.
In 2016, the WFP needed $8.84 billion and received $5.92 billion, including the United States’ $2 billion. A year later, the need rose to $9.6 billion, but funding was just $5.96 billion — a slight uptick but a bigger shortfall.
There is no reason to expect the needs in 2018 to shrink as conflicts continue.
“The donors are giving more, but I am concerned and worried that this cannot continue,” Smerdon said. “It’s only development that’s going to fix the problem. We are just the Bandaverage Aid.”
A Band-Aid, however, that is everywhere. The WFP funding cuts will affect a staggering number.
In Syria, where a sixyear-old civil war is slowly winding down amid massive devastation and disspokesman
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In Yemen, where a civil war and a foreign blockade make it hard just getting food into the country, half of the 7 million people fed by the WFP are on 60 percent rations (1,260 calories a day).
Similarly in Somalia, where 3 million people receive assistance, the WFP has had to suspend rations for many and reduce them for others.
In Kenya’s sprawling Dadaab refugee camp, the ration cuts have put many of the more than 200,000 Somali residents into debt and forced them to go back to precarious lives in conflictridden Somalia in return for money to pay off their loans.
So far in Ethiopia, there has been no pressure from the government to repatriate Somalis, and what little most refugees hear about what’s going on there — including a truck bomb in Mogadishu in October that killed more than 500 — keeps them from returning.
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