African famine risk `set to rival 1984'

by Timothy Elphick MILLIONS of people in Sudan and Ethiopia could starve in a famine likely to equal that of 1984, the Catholic overseas reliet organisation CAFOD warned this week.
Next month's harvest has been devastated by abysmally low rainfall, the agency said and matters have been made still worse by the continuing civil wars in the northern Ethiopian regions of Tigray and Eritrea. And unless the international community responds early to the prospect of mass starvation in the Horn of Africa a disaster of terrible proportions will be difficult to avert.
This week operational directors of the five leading UK aid organisations making up the Disasters Emergency Committee (CAFOD, Christian Aid, Save the Children, Oxfam and the British Red Cross) met in London to discuss the need for a relief operation in the coming months. The charities agreed that they would support a DEC appeal, but that more information would need to be gathered before it could be launched.
Rob Rees, CAFOD's project officer for Africa, who attended the DEC meeting, said hopes had been high for adequate rains until July. But the absence of rainfall had changed the position, leading the agencies to abandon their hopes for scaling down the existing relief operation in the region by next year.
In Eritrea only about one tenth of the normal rainfall arrived this year, with the result that virtually nothing has grown, whilst in neighbouring Tigray more than half the harvest has been lost. The situation is reported to be just as bad in much of southern and eastern Ethiopia and throughout the Sudan, where as many as five million people are believed to be at risk.
United Nations crop assessment teams are already gathering more detailed information on the extent of the crisis in individual areas. CAFOD fears that the food situation could mirror the last major famine in north-east Africa of six years ago, and that with rebel forces in control of large parts of Tigray and Eritrea relief work will face obstacles not present last time around. The port of Massawa, one of Ethiopia's two main outlets to the sea, is now in the hands of the Eritrean Peoples' Liberation Front and is no longer open.
Any international relief operation would also face political difficulties in the Sudan, where the Islamic government in Khartoum is reluctant to admit the need for outside help. So far the Sudanese government has made no appeal for assistance.
The aid agencies are anxious not to wait until the famine has arrived before mounting a relief campaign. "Once the photographs of starving children appear on the television screens it is easy to get support from people and governments in the west. But by then it will be too late," said Mr Rees.