Word: ethiopias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Today, famine is rampant in Ethiopia, the African nations of the Sahel (Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta), Gambia and in areas of Tanzania and Kenya. Near famine also plagues Bolivia, Syria, Yemen and Nigeria. One poor harvest could bring massive hunger to India, the Sudan, Guyana, Somalia, Guinea and Zaire. In two dozen other nations, the populace faces chronic food shortages. Among them: Bangladesh, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti...
...drought has claimed an equally grim toll in parts of Ethiopia. Provincial bureaucrats kept the horrific dimensions of the catastrophe secret from Addis Ababa, fearing that bad news would anger and embarrass Emperor Haile Selassie and perhaps lead to their own dismissal. Finally, last spring, the number of deaths grew so great that the bureaucrats had to admit their existence and ask for international aid. At first the drought seemed confined to eastern Ethiopia. But a new government survey uncovered big pockets of famine to the south and southeast of the capital. In Bale province alone an estimated...
Drought is not the only enemy. Rain can be just as devastating. When the spring rains came to Ethiopia this March, they broke all known records. Ten inches fell in some sections in three days (compared with one-tenth inch last spring). The torrents washed away vital crops and thousands of tons of top soil. In Wallo province, worst hit by the famine, the deluge swept away villages and roads, overturned supply trucks and dangerously delayed relief efforts...
Conspicuous Absence. An emergency worldwide aid program was launched last year and has already saved more than 1 million Africans from starvation. Private and national agencies, coordinated by the FAO, delivered about 518,000 tons of grain to the Sahel and Ethiopia. This year 770,000 tons have been pledged, nearly half of it by the U.S. and significant amounts by the Common Market, Canada, the Soviet Union, Sweden and China. Conspicuously absent from the ranks of the generous are the newly rich Middle East oil exporters. So far they have contributed less than 1% of the total...
Donkey Caravans. With almost all of the drought area far away from the few railways, navigable rivers and paved roads, relief trucks have had to crawl along sand and dirt paths in desert heat. In Ethiopia, some of the neediest areas are so deep in the countryside that only caravans of donkeys and camels have been able to reach them...