Word: droughts
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Today Ethiopia is in the midst of another drought, and thousands of peasants are again on the move, trekking across the parched landscape in search of that bag of flour or handful of beans that will keep them going for a few more days or weeks. Ethiopia, which has earned the unhappy honor of being rated the globe's poorest country by the World Bank (average annual per capita income: + $110; infant mortality rate: 16.8%), is on the brink of disaster again. At least 6 million of its 46 million people face starvation, and only a relief effort...
...response from the West has again been generous. Last week BBC Correspondent Michael Buerk, whose reporting first alerted the world to the scope of the last famine, led an appeal that raised $650,000 in five days. Weeks before the latest drought attracted publicity, the major private food- aid agencies -- the Red Cross, Oxfam, Caritas, Care and Catholic Relief Services -- were shipping food by sea and air and distributing it to the needy...
Like much of Africa, Ethiopia has always been subject to ecological disaster. Droughts and famines were reported as early as 253 B.C. In the great drought of 1888, a third of the population is said to have died from malnourishment and disease. This latest calamity is part of a 30-year pattern that has seen the rains repeatedly fail along the Sahel, the wide swath of land that cuts Africa in half just below the Sahara. After the 1984-85 drought, which killed an estimated 2 million people in Africa, there was a brief period of uncommon optimism in Addis...
...this age of the green revolution, with crop yields skyrocketing, drought no longer automatically means famine. India, for example, is now in the midst of its worst drought in decades, but because it has a food surplus and a relatively organized system for feeding the hungry, few are expected to starve. Usually it is the combination of drought, mismanagement and civil war that brings famine. Ethiopia is afflicted with all three...
...trucks to transport food to rural areas. But the biggest block in the pipeline is civil strife. The government is battling 23 rebel groups and factions in every part of the country. The two strongest insurgent armies are in Tigre and Eritrea, the provinces hit hardest by the drought. Eritrea has been in rebellion against the government ever since it was annexed by Ethiopia in 1962, and a guerrilla movement began building in Tigre...