(Sunday, 14 August 2011, The Independent)--Its population is starving while the country takes in more Somali refugees. Since the food crisis began in the Horn of Africa, Somalia and Kenya have dominated the headlines. But more than a third of the nearly 13 million now going hungry in East Africa are in Ethiopia.
With its own rural population facing starvation, the country is struggling to cope with a fresh influx of 78,000 refugees in seven months.
The newcomers are mainly women and children; many are so weak they die on arrival. In the past month, the health charity Merlin says it has witnessed more than 50 dying in the Gode area, near the border, having arrived too weak to be saved.
Unlike in Kenya, where provision for refugees was initially adequate but has been overstretched for months, Ethiopia was little prepared for arrivals on such a scale.
At the beginning of March there were 38,000 refugees across two camps. Now the two original camps are at double their capacity, with 40,000 living in each.
A third camp has filled within three weeks with more than 24,000 people, and now a fourth has been opened as a home for the 15,000 or so arriving from a makeshift centre near the border. Kristen Knutson, a public information officer for the UN in Ethiopia, said:
"There was a much lower service provision in Ethiopia than Kenya. There wasn't much infrastructure in place; then suddenly you had this enormous increase in the number of refugees coming." Read More from The Independent »
With its own rural population facing starvation, the country is struggling to cope with a fresh influx of 78,000 refugees in seven months.
The newcomers are mainly women and children; many are so weak they die on arrival. In the past month, the health charity Merlin says it has witnessed more than 50 dying in the Gode area, near the border, having arrived too weak to be saved.
Unlike in Kenya, where provision for refugees was initially adequate but has been overstretched for months, Ethiopia was little prepared for arrivals on such a scale.
At the beginning of March there were 38,000 refugees across two camps. Now the two original camps are at double their capacity, with 40,000 living in each.
A third camp has filled within three weeks with more than 24,000 people, and now a fourth has been opened as a home for the 15,000 or so arriving from a makeshift centre near the border. Kristen Knutson, a public information officer for the UN in Ethiopia, said:
"There was a much lower service provision in Ethiopia than Kenya. There wasn't much infrastructure in place; then suddenly you had this enormous increase in the number of refugees coming." Read More from The Independent »
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