06 April 2000
18 Million Africans at Risk of Starvation in Horn
(U.S. relief official warns after visiting region) (1050) By Charles W. Corey Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- Eighteen million Africans are now at risk of starvation from drought in the Horn of Africa and more than half of those potential famine victims are living in already hard-hit Ethiopia, warned a top U.S. relief official who just returned from the region. Briefing reporters at the State Department April 5 following a two-week assessment trip to the area, Hugh Parmer, the assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development's Bureau for Humanitarian Response, said conditions in the Horn are most severe in southern Ethiopia. Parmer, who visited Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Kenya, characterized the situation in the southern Ethiopian town of Gode as "quite appalling." "As we drove from the airport ... the fields on both sides of the road were littered with the carcasses of dead livestock, animals of all kinds -- cattle, sheep, goats, even a few camels, which are, of course, the hardiest of beasts," Parmer said. Both therapeutic and supplemental feeding programs for children are now under way there, he told reporters. (In therapeutic feeding, the child is brought into a facility and kept there as a patient while feedings are administered. In supplemental feeding, supplemental rations are given to the parent to administer to their children, who are then brought back by the parents for regular weighings and medical checkups.) Parmer recalled that between 500 and 1,000 mothers and children were gathered outside the gates of a supplemental feeding facility in Gode, waiting for their children to be tested to determine whether they qualified. "The most dramatic thing I saw there," he said, "was a woman that I talked to at a displaced persons camp right outside of Gode. She had a baby under her arm that was in obviously very poor condition. She was waiting to qualify the child for the supplemental program. I asked ... about the child, and she said, 'I had three of them when I arrived here two months ago. Two of them have died.'" From Gode, Parmer said, his party flew on to nearby Kelafo, Ethiopia, where they saw the same kind of conditions. He was told about situations that "were even worse" in surrounding areas, but he did not visit those areas because of severe security problems. Parmer said he ordered an immediate airlift of about 40 tons of a corn-soybean mix, high-protein biscuits, and a fortified formula for children who are malnourished. That contribution, he said, was in addition to the 400,000 metric tons of emergency food aid the United States is providing to Ethiopia this year. Parmer said his party next traveled to Baidoa, Somalia, which became known as the "City of Death" during the 1992 famine. Conditions there were "significantly better than what we saw" in Ethiopia, he recalled. In Baidoa, he said, there was a lot of livestock still in relatively good shape and the stores and streets were busy. What was most interesting in Somalia, particularly in the Baidoa area, he said, was the gratitude its leaders expressed "toward the United States and toward the international community for the intervention in 1992 and '93." He termed that experience "rewarding" in the sense that "a lot of us have a view of that intervention as certainly not successful, given the way it ended. "What they said to me was, 'The United States and the international community saved tens of thousands of lives that would have been lost if you had not intervened at that time.'" Parmer said that the United States is providing 18,000 metric tons of food aid to Somalia this year in hopes of averting a famine-like situation. Parmer and his relief assessment team also inspected the port of Djibouti's infrastructure. It will be through Djibouti, he said, that food assistance to Ethiopia will arrive. He pledged $600,000 to help improve the port's operational capacity and announced that USAID would contribute as well 2,000 metric tons of food valued at $1 million. Parmer, who met with representatives of the World Food Program (WFP) and port officials, said they concluded that Djibouti probably lacks the capacity to handle the 120,000 to perhaps 150,000 metric tons of food that will be needed in the peak periods of July, August, and September. Nonetheless, the "real trouble," he warned, "involves the logistics from Djibouti on," where the roads are very bad and there are not enough trucks to deliver the food. Parmer said his group also traveled to the Somali port of Berbera, which the WFP has identified as its secondary backup port. Smaller ships must service that port, he explained, because it is a shallow harbor in comparison to Djibouti. Parmer acknowledged that he did not get to the drought-affected region of Eritrea, whose most drought-affected area, "strangely and interestingly," is along the eastern coastal regions. Instead, he went south and visited some of the camps for people who have been displaced by the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea. "I must say, those people were in awfully good condition for -- some of them had been displaced from their homes for as much as 20 months. Although, again, the people in those camps were almost entirely dependent upon food aid, which at that point was coming almost exclusively from the Eritrean government," he noted. While there, Parmer said, he announced the United States would participate in the WFP appeal for food assistance to Eritrea. He pledged 40,800 metric tons of food aid valued at $20 million. Parmer and his party also traveled to Kenya, where they met with U.S. government and USAID officials and pledged 33,400 metric tons of food valued at $18 million. Total U.S. food aid to Kenya this year is expected to reach 62,960 metric tons. Besides helping drought victims, food aid is also provided to refugees and for development programs. After departing the Horn region, Parmer held talks in Rome and Brussels to discuss the drought situation with officials of the WFP and the European Union before returning to Washington. (The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: usinfo.state.gov)
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