The rain failure in Ethiopia is now as bad as it was during the 1983-1985 famine that led to over 400,000 deaths, says Ken Kim, World Renew’s director of Disaster Response and Rehabilitation.
A large portion of the population in Ethiopia live in rural areas that rely on rain-fed agriculture. Due to the failure of the last two seasonal rains, many people are facing extreme hunger. World Renew is responding.
The cause of this change in weather patterns is a phenomenon known as El Niño. In layman’s terms, El Niño is a weather system that occurs every few years as a result of warm ocean currents.
As winds blow over the ocean, they set off a chain of impacts that are especially damaging to those in the developing world.
Some El Niño events are mild, while others can be quite strong.
Even a weak El Niño can disrupt typical weather patterns – causing too much rain in some parts of the world and not enough in others. A strong one, such as the one that occurred in 1997-1998, can cause billions of dollars of destruction and kill tens of thousands of people.
The El Niño predicted for this year is expected to be the strongest ever recorded. Its impacts are already being felt in places like Ethiopia where thousands of farming families now have no harvests to count on. Experts expect that the impacts will soon be felt across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
World Renew, through its membership in the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, is working with Food for the Hungry Ethiopia to provide urgently needed food to 28,800 drought-affected people.
This project will be centered in the Halaba District of Ethiopia - a lowland area that often suffers from food insecuritiy due to erratic rainfall. Currently, it is one of the most critical areas of the country requiring assistance.
Families will receive cereals, lentils, oil, and famix - a highly nutritious porridge designed to fight severe malnutrition, especially in children who need high levels of protein to grow.
Due to current funding restrictions, the project will only provide these emergency rations for three months, although it will likely take another six months to sustain lives until the next harvest.
The Humanitarian Coordinator of the UN World Food Program stated, “The challenge we have before us is incredibly serious, and it will take the collective effort of the entire international community to support the government in preventing the worst effects of El Niño now and well into next year.”
The United Nations, the government of Ethiopia, and the international community of non-government organizations are all agree this situation is urgent and will take a global effort in order to prevent mass famine.
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