Government and UN action has averted an immediate hunger emergency in Ethiopia, but high food prices are still making it hard for parents to feed their children, a major medical charity said. The cost of teff grain - used to make the thin, round spongy bread that accompanies most Ethiopian meals - has more than doubled in the past year, and lentils have quadrupled in price, said International Medical Corps (IMC).
"There is a food shortage," IMC's country director in Ethiopia, Seifu Woldeamanuel, told Reuters in a telephone interview from Addis Ababa. "I don't know how people will cope if no food is injected."
This year, aid agencies have issued warnings about similar problems in nearby countries dealing with the overlap of drought and high global food prices - Somalia, Kenya, Djiboutiparts of Uganda.
At the same time, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) had warned it could not afford to provide for hungry Ethiopians, and the UN children's fund, UNICEF, had said as many as 6 million children under five were at risk of acute malnutrition. Now IMC says respite has arrived on several fronts - the rains have come, and the government and WFP have stepped up their promises of food aid. Woldeamanuel said the extra food would not only feed people but help bring prices down. But not all aid agencies agree the crisis has been averted.
The UN World Health Organisation (WHO) is calling for $25 million, saying the recent rains could in fact exacerbate the situation.ccording to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, more than 83 percent of Ethiopia's 81 million people live in rural areas. Most families farm their own food, which is risky in a country regularly ravaged by drought.
The World Bank says Ethiopia needs to rethink its dependence on subsistence agriculture and Woldeamanuel said the country needed to find alternative ways of creating employment and modernise its farming - for example by introducing small-scale irrigation to increase yields.
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