Ethiopia facing worst famine disaster

ETHIOPIA faces a famine dwarfing the disaster that hit the country in the 1980s, its prime minister warned yesterday.

Meles Zenawi called for urgent international action to avoid a major human catastrophe.

“The facts speak for themselves. The disaster we had in 84-85, the number involved was roughly a third to one half of the number of people involved now.”

“So if that was a nightmare, this will be too ghastly to contemplate,” Mr Zenawi said.

Bob Geldof, who masterminded the Live Aid appeal, said the problem of famine would always return.

“Part of you has to accept that maybe certain parts of the world for the moment are untenable,” he said. “That’s very hard to say to the people who live in that area.”

Geldof attacked the EU for spending half its budget on the Common Agricultural Policy.

“It is a bit early in the morning for my usual righteous indignation, which unfortunately is my uniform response and I’m sure people are tired of it,” he said. “But since 1984-5 Live Aid, if it did nothing else, put this at the very top of the political agenda. It is the stuff of the G8 summits and the Johannesburg and ... all the rest.

“And yet we see 15 million people in one country alone. That is frankly untenable ...

“It seems that 18 years on since whenever ordinary people went to bat, all these supposed ideas and recommendations don’t seem to have been very effective.”

Geldof referred to a report from Ethiopia earlier in the programme featuring a starving eight-year-old boy waiting to die.

“What still kills me is that he just wants death to hurry up and come,” Geldof said.

The report also featured a mother who said she had no food to give her children.

Prime Minister Zenawi said the current drought was unique because the short and long rains had failed.

“The latest information we have is that the number of affected people could be as high as 15 million.”

There was “no possibility” Ethiopia could cope without international aid.

“Even if we had the food available in the domestic market the government doesn’t have the money to buy this surplus food for redistribution,” Mr Zenawi said.

“So we can’t cope on our own with the requirements of the current drought.”

Ethiopia needed food aid in “huge amounts” to avoid catastrophe, he warned.

“I very much hope we will get the assistance we need so we do not live through repeated nightmares.”