Ethiopia Says It Needs $266 Million for Emergency Drought Aid

By Jason McLure

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) — Ethiopia needs $266 million to help feed 6.4 million people suffering from food shortages due to drought, an increase of 1.8 million since June, the government said.

Millions of peasant farmers and pastoralists in the Horn of Africa country are struggling to cope with the affects of the failure of the short rains in February and March, known as the “belg,” Mitiku Kassa, the state minister for agriculture and rural development, said today in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“It is unprecedented, the failure of the belg,” Kassa said at a meeting with international donors. “We need additional resources.”

International relief agencies need 270,245 metric tons of food to meet aid needs from September to December of this year. Donors have pledged less than two-thirds of the aid requests made earlier this year, Kassa said.

About 80 percent of Ethiopians rely on rain-fed farming even though the economy has experienced double-digit growth over the past four years. Beyond the number of people needing emergency aid, another 7.4 million people depend on a donor- funded “safety-net” program that provides food to families for at least six months of the year.

Ethiopia, a nation of 78 million people, now has 50,000 tons of food in its emergency reserves, down from 400,000 normally.

Shortages of emergency food reserves hampered the response effort to the drought earlier this year, the agriculture ministry said in a report today.

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Source: Bloomberg