ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – The United States expressed concern on Thursday over an Ethiopian bill that could restrict the activities of foreign aid groups and sounded alarm bells over the food situation in the country.
The draft bill allows more government interference in the affairs of foreign NGOs and bans them from working on issues related to ethnicity, gender and children’s rights.
“We take the law seriously. We’re concerned about it, and donors have raised the issue to the government,” USAID assistant administrator for democracy, conflict and humanitarian issues Michael Hess told reporters in Addis Ababa.
The bill was unveiled earlier this year and slightly watered down in June, but it continues to spark concern among the aid community. It now is due to be submitted to parliament after the new session opens in October.
Hess said Washington, Ethiopia’s staunchest international ally, was urging Addis Ababa to reconsider the bill.
“We’re in discussions with the government about the law. I think they’ll continue refining it,” he said. “We have a healthy relationship with the government and Ethiopia is a strategic partner to the United States.”
Hess, who is on a four-day visit, also expressed concern over food delivery delays in Ethiopia’s restive Somali region, where almost half of the population requires food aid.
“We estimate that only 41 percent of distribution in July reached affected areas (due to delays). We want to make sure that 100 percent reaches the beneficiaries,” he said.
In early September, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes called on Ethiopia to grant aid agencies more access in the conflict zone.
Hess said there was unfettered access in most areas, but stressed that some difficulties remained.
“There are still tough areas but in the past few weeks there has been an improvement,” he added.
Ethiopia’s military launched a bruising military crackdown last year after the Ogaden National Liberation Front, an ethnic-based separatist group, attacked a Chinese-run oil venture, killing 77 people.
The United Nations says 4.6 million people in Ethiopia need emergency assistance while another eight million require food relief due to the latest drought.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The party conventions and the Sarah Palin surge behind them, Barack Obama and John McCain are neck and neck again in their race for the White House — with the momentum and the political environment tilting toward the Democrats.
Upcoming televised debates provide the next likely opportunity for someone to take control.
In recent days, Democrat Obama has seemed to regain his footing amid Wall Street’s chaos and a renewed focus on the economy, a Democratic strength with a Republican in the White House. Also, McCain’s late-summer boost, credited to his choice of Palin as his running mate, has appeared to dissipate.
A flurry of national polls now show Obama even or slightly ahead of McCain depending on the survey. The race to reach 270 Electoral College votes, however, remains extraordinarily close in Ohio, Florida and other key states.
“The tide came in, but the tide has gone back out. We’re back to where we were” in early August, said Alex Castellanos, a GOP operative and veteran of President Bush’s re-election campaign. “Republicans are in for a tough week.”
If not six.
By most indicators, this is an election year made for Democrats.
Most people think the country is headed the wrong direction, and they are very sour on Bush. The nation is at war and in economic straits. History shows voters are reluctant to keep a political party in office for three straight terms, and people are hungry for change.
Even so, Obama has struggled to stake out a significant lead. He has been fighting to reassure voters who can’t see him — a first-term senator from Chicago with a foreign-sounding name, black skin and a liberal voting record — as president.
Despite that, Obama spent much of the summer driving the campaign agenda.
Then, McCain likened Obama to a celebrity who offered little but soaring rhetoric, and rolled out hard-hitting TV ads against him. Democrats fretted that their guy was too slow to respond, and some questioned whether Republicans were right.
During a party-unifying Democratic convention, Obama went after McCain with fervor.
One day later, McCain shocked the political world — Obama’s campaign included — by naming Palin his vice presidential nominee, making her the first woman on a GOP national ticket. Then, he gave a convention speech emphasizing his reformer streak as he sought to free himself from the albatross that is the unpopular Bush.
McCain entered the fall having energized the party’s conservative base and wielding a message of change. Polls showed an uptick in overall support as women swung toward the Republican team.
Obama’s campaign appeared unsure how to respond as questions of character and personality dominated the dialogue. Party insiders openly urged Obama to return to the one issue that Democrats have had an edge on for months — the economy.
Then, financial institutions began failing and the stock market tumbled.
“It allowed Obama to bring the dialogue back to where he expected it to be and where he wanted it to be, after a few personality driven weeks,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster and former Hillary Rodham Clinton adviser.
Obama embraced the shift.
He blamed Bush policies and argued McCain would offer the same. He empathized with a smarting public.
“Unlike Sen. McCain, it didn’t take a crisis on Wall Street for me to understand that folks are hurting out on Main Street,” said Obama, finding his stride as he talked more in soundbites, less in soaring rhetoric.
McCain, meantime, has stumbled — at, perhaps, the worst possible time.
As markets nose-dived, the Arizona senator made his oft-repeated assertion that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Democrats called him out of touch and just like Bush.
McCain, who has acknowledged that economics is not his strongest suit, also called the chaos “one of the most severe crises in modern times.” He’s spent the days since trying to explain, let voters know that he feels their pain and distance himself from Bush, saying he would fire Securities and Exchange Chairman Christopher Cox — appointed by Bush in 2005 — if he were president.
Meanwhile, Palin’s personal and professional lives have undergone intense examination, and it’s left her a tad worse for the wear.
She struggled to answer foreign policy questions in her first televised interview, was parodied on “Saturday Night Live” as lacking substance and has been the subject of a spate of negative news stories about her brief tenure as Alaska governor and as a small-town mayor.
Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican, called it a “stretch” to say she has the experience needed to be president if needed and added: “She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials.” And, while he didn’t question her qualifications, Bush’s former political guru Karl Rove labeled Palin a “political pick” and said excitement over her will subside.
Perhaps it already has.
(Liz Sidoti covers the presidential campaign for The Associated Press and has covered national politics since 2003.)
‘Leader-less People’ by Teshome Mitiku from his previous album ‘Deluge’
[podcast]http://freedownloads.last.fm/download/104868492/Leader-less%2BPeople.mp3[/podcast]
CARE’s report quotes a 9-year-old Ethiopian boy, Mohammed, who says families he knows in the capital Addis Ababa are eating in shifts, the oldest on Monday, the second on Tuesday, the third on Wednesday. “If he’s lucky there is something for the eldest to eat on Wednesday morning or evening again.”
This year, as a food emergency in drought-prone Ethiopia stares donors in the face, many are splashing cash around to save lives. And yet, CARE says that just months earlier some of the same donors turned down its requests for funding to avoid a food crisis in the Horn of Africa.
Overhaul the global relief system now or watch millions more people slide over the edge into destitution, an aid agency says in a report full of warnings to donors, governments and humanitarians alike.
As rocketing food and fuel prices force more people to resort to begging and more children to give up school to work, CARE International says it would be better – and much cheaper – to act now than to try to wade in later with inefficient life-saving aid.
“We’ve got a choice what to do. Wait until people need emergency response – and that’s extremely expensive – or look at new ways of supporting people to feed themselves,” says Vanessa Rubin, who co-wrote CARE’s report.
The global food crisis has tipped 100 million people into destitution in the last two years, CARE says. And the forecast for the near future is dire.
“The price of food and fuel have shot up – that’s not going to change,” Rubin says. “We’re seeing more and more sudden emergencies – and with climate change that’s only going to get worse. And in some of the countries we’re talking about, we’re seeing population growth accelerating at an alarming rate.
“Those three things are going to push more people over the edge to the point where they can’t meet their needs.”
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation has just calculated that 75 million more people were added to the ranks of the world’s hungry in 2007, taking the global figure to roughly 925 million.
The report recommends a new global fund to deal with the crisis. The fund would involve the United Nations, multilateral organisations, local government, aid agencies, civil society, the private sector and beneficiaries, the agency envisions.
CARE doesn’t say how much the fund would need, but British-based aid agency Oxfam estimated in a June report that it would take $14.5 bn to meet the needs of people affected by the food crisis now.
However Rubin says it’s not just about more aid, but about the kind of aid.
CARE’s report says relief at the moment is too short-term and too focused on responding when an emergency is in full swing instead of protecting the ways people make a living.
In Niger, too, three years after the country’s worst food emergency for decades, CARE says almost 20 percent of the population is again facing hunger as drought and flooding wipe out their dwindling food stocks.
“Instead of just waiting until an emergency reaches its peak, people need long-term, predictable aid so agencies can identify the people who are most vulnerable and help them become more resilient,” Rubin says.
CARE says governments all round the world should be putting safety nets in place to help their populations avoid slipping over the edge, and relief agencies need an urgent shake-up too.
“We need to find clever and different ways to use limited resources to change things,” she says.
CARE calls for aid agencies to turn down monetised food aid from the U.S. government – food aid sold to raise cash for poverty-raising programmes.
CARE made a dramatic turnaround on this issue several years ago when it began arguing that the U.S. system was inefficient, wasted half of every dollar spent on shipping food across the world, and undermined local markets by competing with local farmers’ crops.
Humanitarians also need to get to grips with the reality that many of the people most at risk today are urban poor, and shift their thinking accordingly.
And they should be helping pastoralists to retain their way of life in a changing world. The traditional herding that sustains many people across Africa is viable, CARE says, but many communities could do with a lot more support accessing credit or veterinary expertise or setting up fodder banks to tide them through hard times.
The world’s wealthy countries are already falling far short of their pledges under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) – approved in 2000 by U.N. member states and the world’s top development organisations – to boost development aid and slash poverty by 2015.
By then, CARE estimates, nearly $200 billion will have been spent fighting emergencies, if we carry on with the status quo.
A meeting in New York on Sept. 25 to review progress on the MDGS will confirm everyone is failing to meet their targets.
And unless they make headway with the first goal – halving hunger – CARE says it will be impossible to achieve the rest, such as gender equality and education.
The nomadic people of the eastern deserts accuse the Ethiopian government Woyanne regime of deliberately starving people to death, reports Jonathan Rugman of Channel 4 News.
Deliberately starving people to death: that’s the accusation being levelled at the Ethiopian government ruling Tigean People Liberation Front (Woyanne) by the poor nomadic people of the country’s eastern deserts.
Here, famine threatens as people go days without food. Channel 4 News has learned it’s not just the failure of crops that’s to blame – it’s also the Ethiopian the U.S. financed and trained Woyanne army.
Channel 4 News travelled into the Ogaden desert, where most of the inhabitants are Muslim ethnic Somalis, trapped in the middle of a war between rebels fighting for independence autonomy and the Ethiopian Woyanne army. Watch the video below:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The party conventions and the Sarah Palin surge behind them, Barack Obama and John McCain are neck and neck again in their race for the White House — with the momentum and the political environment tilting toward the Democrats.