Narcotic use, drought rob babies of food – The Washington Times
July 13th, 2008
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/13/narcotic-use-drought-rob-babies-of-food/
DIRE DAWA, Ethiopia | When drought and food shortages hit, it is the very young who suffer first, and most.
Weighing only 10 pounds, Ayaan is among nearly 100,000 Ethiopian children whose lives are at risk. Just four days before her first birthday, she is lighter than an average 3-month-old baby.
A clinic at Kersi, about 15 miles outside Ethiopia’s second city Dire Dawa, has seen an increasing number of such cases in recent weeks, as have locations across the south and west of the country. Much of the land is used to grow the cash-crop narcotic known as khat.
Khat plantation outside Dire Dawa, June 08 (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
In more than a dozen villages outside the city, this reporter witnessed groups of mainly young men, but also some women, getting high in the shade on the chewed leaves. Khat is an appetite suppressant, and local culture means that children often eat only after adults. (more…)
Despite food shortages, Ethiopia to grow biofuel crops – The Irish Examiner
July 7th, 2008
Despite hunger, Ethiopia’s growing economy looks to biofuel crops to cut energy costs
- Simon Roughneen, Dire Dawa, eastern Ethiopia
When drought and food shortages hit, it is the very young who suffer first, and most. Weighing only 4.5 kg, Ayaan is among the almost 100,000 children whose lives are at risk across Ethiopia. Just four days before her first birthday, she weighs no more than an average 3 month old baby. This clinic, about 15 miles outside Ethiopia’s second city Dire Dawa, is seeing an increasing amount of such cases over recent weeks.
Mother gives her child some specially-made therapeutic food, designed to offset malnutrition (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Here land is used to grow the cash-crop narcotic known as khat. In over a dozen villages on the northbound road out of the city, this reporter witnessed groups of mainly young men, but also some women, getting high in the shade on the chewed leaves. This drug is an appetite-suppressant, and local culture means that children often only eat after adults. As the doctor at this clinic told this newspaper “if parents are on khat, the whole family goes hungry.” (more…)
Young Ethiopians malnourished – RTÉ World Report
July 5th, 2008
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0705/worldreport.html
At a feeding centre for malnourished children in southern Ethiopia (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Ethiopia: already too late? – Irish Examiner
June 30th, 2008
Mother & child at GOAL clinic, Awassa. (Simon Roughneen)
- Awassa, southern Ethiopia
“She is seven years old”, said Matiwos Kambata to this reporter. Incredulity would be the most apt response, were it not for the fact that his little sister Regisa, who looks no more than three years of age, is among the hundreds of thousands whose lives are in jeopardy as Ethiopia suffers another life-destroying drought. The darkening clouds – the wrong ones – of drought and hunger again stalk the countryside, while the much-needed rainbearers remain elusive, aloof as some capricious deity in the sky and oblivious to Regisa and the hundreds of thousands of severely-malnourished children below.
When drought and food shortages hit, it is the very young who suffer first, and most. The stabilisation clinic at Galla Wacho, about 40 kilometers from the regional capital Awassa, where Matiwos and Regisa have stayed for a week, to allow the medics there carefully oversee what all hope to be the first step in her recovery, usually caters for under-fives, rather than older children.
A crisis spreading? Perhaps. Sitting alongside Regisa is Benetu: listless, emaciated, unable to walk due to a combination of hunger and illness, but at twelve years old a fearful indication that as the drought takes its toll, the crisis threatens to spread to older and stronger age groups. (more…)
Ethiopian drought effects made worse by global food and fuel prices – VoA
June 26th, 2008
http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/2008-06-26-voa33.cfm MP3 below: |
- Simon Roughneen with Joe deCapua
It’s estimated four and a half million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance as a result of drought. That’s on top of more than seven million already receiving other types of humanitarian and government aid. Higher food prices have made it more difficult to deal with the situation.
Simon Roughneen, a freelance journalist and analyst, is traveling through the drought-stricken parts of the country. He’s currently in Sidama Province in the southwest, about 800 kilometers from Addis Ababa. He spoke to VOA English to Africa Service reporter Joe De Capua. (more…)
Somalia in Catch-22 after Islamists are routed – ISN
January 8th, 2007
With an apparently facile victory achieved over the Council of Somalia Islamic Courts, the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government faces a more difficult challenge in establishing a functioning government in Somalia.
Ethiopian soldier (AFP/Getty)
By Simon Roughneen
After a blitzkrieg campaign launched Christmas Eve involving an estimated 15,000 Ethiopian troops backed by tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has established itself in Mogadishu, after spending most of its precarious and ineffective existence thus far in the western town of Baidoa.
The quick defeat of the Islamists has averted fears of a Somali vortex pulling the Horn of Africa into a regional war. But in its place, a long-running guerrilla campaign and renewed insecurity are likely. Princeton Lyman, Africa Program Director at the Council on Foreign Relations, told ISN Security Watch, “I expect a good deal of instability and warlord-type of activity for awhile at least.”
Ethiopian and TFG troops much assert control rapidly, before Islamists regroup or are rearmed by the Hawiye, as a means of curbing renewed warlord chaos. The Ethiopian presence may radicalize a greater proportion of Somali Muslims. (more…)
5 years on the streets, but now I want a Physics doctorate – Irish Independent
November 28th, 2006
- personifies Plato’s maxim that ‘courage is a kind of salvation’.
GOAL staff in Addis Ababa (Robbie Reynolds)
ADDIS ABABA – Now 18, Asnakech* has a big smile for her GOAL friends as she gossips while making lunch at the golf club where works as a cook. “I am happy now. I spent four years at GOAL. I was trained in catering. I work in this kitchen – I was promoted – more money! I will start university soon.”
Asnakech is forward-thinking yet friendly. She wants a PhD in Physics after graduating. With a resolve rooted in her own Christian faith, she personifies Plato’s maxim that ‘courage is a kind of salvation’.
Genet Abay works at GOAL’s street children centres across Addis Ababa. She tells how, “We found Asnakech sleeping rough in a stadium. Her parents were immigrants from Eritrea, displaced by war. She was malnourished, and sadly, like most girls on the street she was sexually abused.”
In Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Freetown and Calcutta, where GOAL works with streetkids, these children often have no family, are unwanted by relatives, and vulnerable to physical harm. (more…)
Hard to believe your eyes: drought in Kenya and Ethiopia – OpenDemocracy
May 15th, 2006
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-africa_democracy/drought_3542.jsp
Driving through northern Kenya’s drought-affected famine district as the midday sun lifts temperatures to over 40 degrees centigrade, pools of water shimmer in the distance, laying between dessicated trees and shrubs, with the mountains of Turkana peering through the haze.
Mirage in Turkana, northern Kenya (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
But these aren’t pools. There is no water here. By a cruel irony, this parched land taunts its thirsty and hungry people with distant images – mirages – of glistening oases in the distance. There hasn’t been rainfall since 2004, according to Akwari Nubukwi, an elder in the village of Kanigipur in the southern Turkana district. “We use the water from the riverbed, where we dig to find it. But it is just a little water, and even the goats and dogs drink from it”, he told me.
The locals who are now suffering without water, whose animals – their main food and livelihood source – are dying, know better to be caught out by the illusion of water. Akwari adds: “Many animals have died. We haven’t had rain for a year. People are losing their animals. We are hungry now.” (more…)
Cattle dying, people next? – HeraldAM
May 2nd, 2006
Leaning on his walking stick, Shamsidin Mohamed flicks his fingers up and down in turn, alternating between whispering and counting out loud in his native Somali.
By the time he has finished, he tots-up 23 cattle dead out of a herd of 70. It is a catastrophic loss. These herders are dependent on their animals for food and income. No agriculture is possible in such a barren, rock-strewn, sun-dried place, more lunar than earthly in appearance.
“This is very dangerous here. Just a little rain, but no pasture for the animals. Most people can’t count the dead animals. We have to move many kilometres every day looking for pasture, water. The animals are weak, they die in the bush, sometimes people don’t know when and where
Emaciated cattle in southern Oromo region in drought-affected Ethiopia, clse to Kenyan border (Simon Roughneen)
The vital winter rains failed across southern Ethiopia, northern Kenya and much of Somalia, leaving Shamsidin and 8 million others in this vast desolate region balancing precariously between subsistence and destitution.
Here, with people utterly dependent on herding animals for food and income, destitution means potential starvation. With their skin stretched taut over protruding ribcages and calvicles, the cattle are emaciated, shuffling along with their heads bowed, as if lacking the strength to see where the herder is taking them. (more…)
‘No water, no rain – we can’t feed the animals’ – Village
April 26th, 2006
Simon Roughneen in Moyale, Kenya-Ethiopia border.
Livestock death is regarded as a precursor of famine (Photo: Simon Roughneen, southern Ethiopia)
At least five million people are chronically food-dependent in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation. In the Somali and Oromo regions, failed rains mean failed water sources for animals and for people. Failed rains mean no pasture or foliage for the cattle, camels, donkeys and goats that people depend on for food and livelihoods.
Prices for animals plummet, meaning that sale prices cannot do much to help people purchase food and other essential items. As animals die, people are left vulnerable. Mohamed Yusuf, a herder moving his animals on the Moyale-Yabelo road in southern Ethiopia, said: “This is dangerous for us. No water, no rain. We can’t feed the animals. Twenty one of my cattle have died. I have no other source of income. And now I can’t sell any animals. The price is one-fifth of the real value before the drought.”
And although a little rain has fallen on the parched land, it is just that: a little. And the rains due for the next two months will likely be insufficient in any case. But the rain brings its own problems. A poisoned chalice poured from the sky, rain makes animals and people, already weakened from malnutrition, prone to diseases such as measles. And when rivers and lakes are watered again, malaria becomes a serious threat, and what is left of northern Kenya’s infrastructure has been threatened by flash floods.
In Somalia – a non-existent state is prey to warlords and gangsters, making delivery of aid difficult at best and downright dangerous at worst. And recent weeks has seen dozens killed in cattle-raiding in northern Kenya, as resources are depleted and the stakes are raised for men with guns.
And with pre-famine conditions rife in the drought-affected region, there is not much time left if another full-scale famine hits Ethiopia, and across the horn of Africa. (more…)
