EDITOR’S NOTE: The starvation in Ethiopia is caused by the corrupt, brutal dictatorship that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to buy weapons that are used to terrorize the people of Ethiopia and neighboring countries. It should be noted that the U.S.-backed Woyanne regime spends over a $1 million per day in its war with neighboring Somalia alone.

By Jason McLure, Bloomberg

Ethiopia needs $266 million to help feed 6.4 million people suffering from food shortages due to drought, an increase of 1.8 million since June, the government said.

Millions of peasant farmers and pastoralists in the Horn of Africa country are struggling to cope with the affects of the failure of the short rains in February and March, known as the “belg,” Mitiku Kassa, the state minister for agriculture and rural development, said today in the capital, Addis Ababa.

“It is unprecedented, the failure of the belg,” Kassa said at a meeting with international donors. “We need additional resources.”

International relief agencies need 270,245 metric tons of food to meet aid needs from September to December of this year. Donors have pledged less than two-thirds of the aid requests made earlier this year, Kassa said.

About 80 percent of Ethiopians rely on rain-fed farming even though the economy has experienced double-digit growth over the past four years. Beyond the number of people needing emergency aid, another 7.4 million people depend on a donor- funded “safety-net” program that provides food to families for at least six months of the year.

Ethiopia, a nation of 78 million people, now has 50,000 tons of food in its emergency reserves, down from 400,000 normally.

Shortages of emergency food reserves hampered the response effort to the drought earlier this year, the agriculture ministry said in a report today.

Food Ration

In July, the monthly food ration to those in need was cut by a third due to shortages of aid, a situation worsened by spiking world food and fuel prices.

While farmers have begun to harvest crops from Ethiopia’s main rainy season from June to September, the government and aid agency officials say they are concerned about food shortages, particularly in eastern Ethiopia.

“We worry the situation remains very fragile in many regions,” said Marc Rubin, the emergency coordinator for the United Nations Children’s Fund in Ethiopia. “Acute watery diarrhea is still at an epidemic level.”

About 30 percent of pregnant and nursing mothers are malnourished in four major regions of the country, the agriculture ministry said in its report.

Ethiopia’s government and international aid agencies have quarreled in recent months about the severity of the drought, with the government accusing some relief organizations of exaggerating its severity in order to raise funds.

The Ethiopian government has increased its estimates of those in need twice since the failure of the rains.

The government in August reorganized the agency in charge of disaster assistance, replacing its director, Simon Mechale, and its spokesman, Sisay Tadesse, and putting the body under the authority of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at [email protected].