Ethiopia update

6th August 2008 - by SCIAF’s Selina Donnelly.

When imagining a drought affected area, stretches of dry, dusty land is what comes to mind. Yet much of Southern Ethiopia is green. Here people call it ‘green hunger’ – this is when there are no crops from the first harvest and the second harvest is months away.

Earlier this year drought resulted in almost total harvest failure and death of livestock animals in many regions of the country. Now Ethiopia finds itself in the grip of a crisis caused by the drought and rising costs of food and fuel prices around the world. The situation is expected to get worse.

Moges Abebe, the Emergency Co-ordinator for SCIAF’s local partner Meki Catholic Secretariat, explains, “The next few months are critical and in the meantime people are struggling.”

People are now eating cactus and whatever wild edible fruits they can find. But despite this many are reaching breaking point.

One woman tells us, “What we need right now is food aid, but we also need to make preparations for cultivation for the next harvest, for this we need seed before the planting season ends. We already used what seed we had in the last season, but it did not grow, the rest we had saved we ate because we are hungry.”