Famine fears for seven million Ethiopian children
Pastor Dale Morgan
Famine fears for seven million Ethiopian children*
* Story Highlights
* Drought and soaring food prices leaves Ethiopian children facing
famine
* UNICEF: Country is facing an open crisis
* UNICEF is appealing for $10 million for Ethiopia's emergency needs
EGU VILLAGE, Ethiopia (CNN) -- A year of drought and soaring food prices
has threatened the lives of tens of thousands of Ethiopian children.
Tens of thousands of Ethiopian children are facing a severe risk of famine.
"We have nothing to feed our children," said Egu's village elder. "We
are losing our children day by day."
Ethiopia's Health Ministry, along with UNICEF, monitors the health of
thousands of children here, but the number of areas they have been able
to regularly visit has been cut in half this year.
The small rains that normally allow Ethiopian farmers to plant a second
crop each year did not come this year, adding to an already critical
food shortage.
"It's an open crisis, and there are more people than we expected, than
the government expected, who need additional food," said Bjorn
Ljungqvist, head of UNICEF Ethiopia.
There is a crucial shortfall in the supply of therapeutic foods used to
treat children with severe acute malnutrition, the UNICEF official said.
The UN's children's agency is appealing for $10 million to pay for
emergency needs of more than 7 million children under 5 as well as
pregnant and nursing mothers in 325 drought-affected districts.
The World Food Programme supplies the emergency food for UNICEF, but
rising food prices mean it could not guarantee aid for all the areas in
need.
"Unless you get immediate assistance the risk is, you fall into severe
malnutrition and eventually death, so unless our supporters come in
immediately for this, we fear that is what is going to happen in the
country," said Jakob Mikkelse, the program's nutrition and education chief.
Egu is a village UNICEF is no longer able to visit on a regular basis.
"If we were not here, those children who we had found now with severe
acute malnutrition would have died at home," UNICEF Emergency Nutrition
Project Officer Samson Dessie said.
UNICEF estimates that 6 million Ethiopian children under the age of 5
are at risk and that more than 120,000 have only about a month to live.
As the relief workers depart Egu, they leave behind a few emergency food
packs and a promise to return.
The Ethiopian government has worked with UNICEF since 2004 on the
Enhanced Outreach Strategy to provide food for child survival. The
effort distributes child survival packages that include vitamin A
supplementation, de-worming, measles catch-up, nutritional screening and
referral to supplementary or therapeutic feeding programs.
"EOS is really very important from many perspectives with regard to
child survival," Dessie said. "The first is it brings high-impact,
low-cost child survival packages like vitamin A, which can reduce child
mortality by up to 35 percent."