Pope urges `support famine appeals'

POPE John Paul II this week urged everyone to "participate in the initiatives which aid organisations, especially those Catholic ones, have begun to implement to urgently avoid the threat of famine".
The Disasters' Emergency Committee, of which CAFOD is a member, hopes that its Ethiopian appeal will raise £5 million, most of it to be spent on the transportation of food to the areas where it is most needed.
In a bid to stop the flow of people away from their homes and towards food distribution points, which then rapidly become "camps", the agencies aim to provide the distribution centres with enough food to enable families to return home, and so not have to wait at the centre until the next shipment arrives. In this way, they hope to avoid a repetition of the 1984/85 experience, when the camps were over crowded and often became centres of disease.
The Disasters' Emergency Committee (CAFOD, Christian Aid, British Red Cross, Oxfam, and Save the Children) launched their Ethiopian Famine Appeal yesterday. Donations should be sent to Ethiopian Famine Appeal, PO Box 999, London EC2R 7ET. Money can be paid at any bank or post office, Credit card donors should ring 01 200 1000 between 9 and 6 until December 9.
Some of the money raised will be used to repair lorries which were first used in the region during the last famine, and which have been used almost continuously since.
Ethiopia receives the world's lowest level of long-term development aid, primarily because the British and US governments withold all development funds in protest at the Ethiopian government's alliance with Moscow, and the country is beset by civil war. One result of the war is that the Ethiopian government spends 46 per cent of its budget on defence.
The Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has granted permission for a collection to be taken in the parishes in aid of CAFOD'S work in Ethopia. The date suggested by the bishops for the appeal is January 3.