Ethiopia’s government has started distributing rations of wheat and oil to people facing hunger in the north and northeastern parts of the country.
The government is now supplying 15 kilograms of wheat and half a litre of cooking oil per adult in the areas hit by drought conditions, according to Mitiku Kassa, secretary of the Ethiopian Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee.
More than 8 million people require urgent food assistance, and the Ethiopian government says there is enough food aid to feed them through December.
Sisay Gebrselassie, a resident of Wukro town in Northern Ethiopia who recently moved to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, said he believed one in five families in his hometown lost their crops. “They have now left their farmlands for their cattle to scavenge whatever they can get from it,” he said, adding that many farmers are selling their cattle before they die.
The UN says the scale of the developing emergency exceeds resources available so far.
The food insecurity is fuelled by the failure of Ethiopia’s spring rains that resulted in poor crop yields.
