By Nicholas Benequista, OneWorld

ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopian Woyanne officials have said that the country will increase its appeal to the international community for a third time this year, criticizing donors for failing to commit resources to a hunger crisis precipitated by drought and rising food prices.

“It is the humanitarian community’s obligation to see that the humanitarian needs are fulfilled,” said Simon Mechale, who heads the country’s disaster relief agency. “The humanitarian community has not been able to fully support what was jointly established.”

Ethiopia is still seeking funding from donors after appealing to them in June for support to feed 4.6 million hungry people. Ethiopian Woyanne State Minister for Agriculture Abera Deresa said the government would increase that number as early as next week, though he declined to say by how many.

Aid workers familiar with the new appeal say the government may ask for aid for as many as 8 million and accuse the government here of failing to admit the severity of the crisis in time. Ethiopia has been eager to leave behind a legacy of famine after a drought in the mid-1980s left nearly 1 million to starve, which may explain why the country was reticent to admit the severity of its latest crisis, they say.

Now, even if the expanded appeal matches needs on the ground, aid workers worry that it may already be too late, especially amid global shortages of food.

“The Ethiopian Woyanne government is facing the crisis and is ready to admit figures it wouldn’t admit in April and March,” one Western donor official said on condition of anonymity.

Donors can take weeks to raise cash and at least four months to provide commodities from their own farmers. Once cash is available, it can take as long as eight weeks to procure food internationally and deliver it to Ethiopia.

In June, Ethiopian Woyanne Minister of Health Tewodros Adhanom announced an appeal to donors for a total of 380,000 metric tons of emergency food this year to feed 4.6 million people, more than twice the 2.2 million thought to have needed aid in April. Tewodros argued then that the government had been carefully prudent to avoid requesting too much aid.

“We always felt that there were more needy people,” said David Throp, who runs Save the Children UK’s Ethiopian office. “We welcome any acknowledgement of additional needs because it allows the international community to respond, but now it’s a question of logistics and time-lags.”

Relief efforts are already suffering from shortages after the global spike in food and gasoline prices essentially cut the purchasing power of the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) in half. Only half the needy are receiving food aid, and the rations they receive have already been cut by a third to conserve resources.

According to a June report from the WFP, the worldwide prices of staple foods like wheat and maize have nearly doubled since the beginning of the decade, making it increasingly difficult for international aid agencies to buy enough food to support crisis-ridden regions.

At the Rome Food Summit in June, governments and international aid agencies pledged to contribute an additional $6 billion to help poorer countries cope with hunger amid increasing food prices.

Food security experts say the global food crisis has emerged due to a combination of factors, including climate changes that have altered rainfall patterns and decreased harvests, increasing demand for corn ethanol and other grains to fuel cars instead of feeding people, and skyrocketing demand for meat — which requires large amounts of grain in the form of animal feed — in rapidly developing countries like China and India.

Economic speculators, who buy up grain reserves in anticipation of selling them at higher prices, have also helped to decrease supplies and increase global prices, say analysts.

“This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before,” says Earth Policy Institute President Lester Brown, who has studied the convergence of ecological, economic, and humanitarian issues for decades.

“The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilization.”

Brown says that the world’s most influential countries must act swiftly to “stabilize population, restrict the use of grain to produce automotive fuel, stabilize the climate, stabilize water tables and aquifers, protect cropland, and conserve soils.”

“None of these goals can be achieved quickly,” he notes, “but progress toward all is essential to restoring a semblance of food security.”

The fruit of $1.5 billion donation to the Meles regime by the U.S., EU, and other international donors.

People seeking assistance at a clinic run by the NGO Medècins Sans Frontieres in Ethiopia, Thomas Dworzak / Magnum for TIME

By Alex Perry / Kuyera

All morning in the village of Kersa, the hills have echoed with the wails of women walking in from the fields. They gather on a patch of open grass before a stretcher made from freshly cut bamboo, bound and laid with banana leaves. On it is a small bundle wrapped in a red and blue blanket. An imam calls the crowd together, asks them to take off their shoes and arranges them in two lines, women behind men, facing east. “Allah Akbar,” he says twice. Then four men pick up the bier, easily handling its weight with one arm, and walk a short way to a freshly dug hole, into which they lower the bundle and bury it. Three other small, fresh graves nearby indicate Ayano Gemeda, 6, was not the first child to starve in Kersa this year. The distended bellies and chicken-wing limbs on other children looking on suggest he won’t be the last. “It’s very bizarre,” says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian member of Medecins Sans Frontieres and a veteran of crises from Afghanistan to Sudan. “It’s so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger.” The reasons are paved in the good intentions of rich nations, good deeds that have punished Ethiopia with perpetual want.

The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day. Hundreds queued with their parents in the rain outside the gates, waiting to be weighed and measured. Inside, children were sectioned by age and urgency. Each were given red and green plastic bowls for diarrhea and vomit. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue.

Transport was scarce. So for five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera. It was depressing work, and insufficient. The two children — Nuritu, 6, and Gemechu, four months — we picked up in Kersa were just the most emaciated among scores that needed help.

The trips to the villages provided glimpses into how emergency food aid worked — or didn’t. Hundreds of millions are spent on immediate food relief because the popular notion is to alleviate the plight of starving children. But that means little is spent on economic development to prevent the shortages that led to hunger in the first place. Says Mafa E. Chipeta, East Africa coordinator for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization: “This is not an emergency only for this year. This is a persistent problem that we have failed to deal with. Aid needs a complete rethink.” In many places, because food comes so abundantly from abroad, local farming is an undeveloped and unreliable source of sustenance. The farmlands may appear teeming but Ethiopians know enough not to trust it. And so, food is apportioned with Malthussian rigidity.

This was evident when we ferried one mother, Medina Wago, with the body of her six-month-old daughter back to their village of Sedeguge. Medina told us Feyinae was the third of her many children to die. The fields of Sedeguge were a patchwork of bright greens and deep, moist browns. Inside the family hut were five full sacks of maize.

Another day, we took Germeda Koro from Kuyera, where he was caring for his daughter Ramete, 6, to Gode village for the funeral of a neighbor’s child. Koro said 20 children had died in Gode. The surrounding fields were overflowing with abundance. On the drive in, we passed a roadside auction for potatoes, huge yellow boulders stuffed 50 kg to a sack. When I asked Koro why people didn’t kill the goats, cows and chickens that roamed the village to save their children, he replied: “Look, maybe one or two of your children get sick every year. But if you kill your animals, you’re ruining everything you have, and everything you’re going to have. You’re risking the lives of the whole family.” Even the decision to take a starving child to hospital — and spend a family’s life savings on a bus ride — was agonizing. The children who died mostly belonged to parents who, hoping for a miraculous recovery, left it until too late.

The UNFAO’s Chipeta said he thought the world food crisis might help Ethiopia in the long-run. Shortages and higher prices would cut food aid. The immediate effect would be harsh, and thousands would die. But if Ethiopia were ever to feed itself, he argued, “you have to make sacrifices at some point.” In the villages, they were already making sacrifices. Children were being left to die so a family might live. That’s a calculation that can strike outsiders as cruel. Some conclude life in Ethiopia is cheap. That’s would be a mistake, as anyone who has heard the funeral wails can tell you. Because of food aid, Ethiopians have learned to make the tough choices.

(With reporting by Kassahun Addis/Addis Ababa)

By Rose Mestika, The Daily Monitor

ADDIS ABABA — Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), care service training on treating a newborn premature baby, low birth weight baby, was offered to 13 Doctors and Nurses at Black lion Hospital in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.

The five-day training in the Care Service, which is said to be the first of its kind were offered to those medical practitioners gathered from six selected hospitals, namely Adigrat, Dessie, Nekemet, Hiwot Fana, Yirgalem and Yekatit 12 Hospital.

Dr. Bogale Worku, Head of Pediatrics department at Black Lion Hospital said yesterday concluding the training; the aim of the training was to expand the KMC service into other hospitals.

“We offer for those medical practitioners a theoretical and practical training on KMC service. KMC is a special way of holding the baby with skin to skin contact between mother and baby, breast feeding and good bonding,”, he said adding that the benefits of this service are to improve the low birth weight baby temperature regulation or cardio-respirator stability and faster growth and development.

The same as the Kangaroo the mother of the baby or the family members hold the premature baby on their upper body for 24 hrs per day. The service will continue from one to eight weeks, the head further explained.

“There is no much attention for babies born too soon or too small. And Ethiopia is one of the highest low birth weight baby’s mortality in the world. This program was started around ten years and still the facility is not expanded and the risk is not minimized”, said Dr. Bogale.

He also said that before the hospital started this program assessments were done whether the doctors, mothers and policy makers accept it or not. The cost and the feasibility were also been studied.

The training was prepared by KMC with the support of Save the Children, USA and access program.

“In Ethiopia around 94% of births takes place at home and facility based delivery is low, therefore, rolling it to limited health facilities is not enough” Dr. Samuel Teshome, saving Newborns Live, Save the Children/US said at the training’s conclusion.

Currently, the KMC service is delivering in Black lion Hospital, Gonder and Jimma Hospitals

MOGADISHU (AFP) — Two Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers were killed Monday in a roadside bomb explosion in southern Somalia, prompting their colleagues to open fire and killing six civilians, witnesses said.

The soldiers were checking for mines on their way to the provincial town of Baidoa from the capital Mogadishu when the bomb went off in Wanlaweyn town north of Mogadishu, they said.

“A roadside bomb killed two Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers as they were walking and checking for mines inside the town,” said Mohamed Wardhere Adan, an elder.

“They opened fire indiscriminately after the explosion, killing six innocent civilians, including a woman,” he added.

Another witness Hussein Shibelow said: “We don’t know who planted it. The Ethiopians Woyannes entered a neighbourhood near where the explosion occured, punishing civilians.”

“I saw the bodies of four men, a woman and a child shot by the Ethiopians Woyannes,” he told AFP.

Roadside bombs are common in Somalia, where insurgents are battling Ethiopian Woyanne forces who backed government troops to oust an their movement in early 2007.

The insurgents also targeted government forces and African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu.

Andualem Sisay, Africanews

Aero vodochody, a Czech company, is to start assembling aircrafts in Ethiopia, which will increase the number of its assembling plants in Africa to three.

The company is going to start assembling AE 270, the model, installed with a ‘tutboprop’, at premises once used by the Ethiopian Airlines to assemble ‘Eshet’, a crop-duster of Eshet Engineering Ltd.

Aero Vodochody is the largest aviation technology manufacturer in the Czech Republic and one of the oldest in the world. It is fully owed by private group, penta, and has two plants in Africa; one in South Africa and another in Kenya. AE 270, with all materials imported from the Czech Republic, on average costs 10 million USD in the European market. It accommodates 8 passengers and is usually owned by investors and tourists for private usage.

Local representative of Aero Vodochody, Getachew Eshetu is owner of Afro-Asia Technical Trading Enterprise and active in the transport business. The representative of the company who seems tired of the lengthy process plans to start producing AE 270, and to further move into assembling larger models.”

He said that the Czech company has chosen Ethiopia to assemble the aircraft and officials of the Ministry of Transport and Communications have written a letter to the management of Ethiopian Airlines to allow the use of their premises, which they are currently awaiting to receive.

Aero Vodochody, commonly referred to as Aero Vodochody is a location. It was a Czech and Czechoslovak aircraft company, active from 1919, notable for producing the L-29 Delfin, L-39 Albatros, L-59 Super Albatros and the L-159 Alca.

After the fall of the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and in the rest of Eastern Europe, the company lost a major portion of its main market in jet trainers the sales of military aircraft declined in the early 1990s in Eastern Europe as well as in the NATO countries where the entry of a new producer was obviously unwanted Aero was controlled for several years by Boeing.

The local representative of the company, Mr. Getachew, has a facility in Debere Markos to produce 100,000 dollar trolley buses.

The first aircraft to be produced by Ethiopian Airlines was ‘Eshet’, but production has stopped. It was produced by Eshet Engineering Ltd, a company founded in 1987 by Doron Oz, a Civil Engineer and graduate of the “Technion” in Haifa, Israel.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – African carrier Ethiopian Airlines plans to buy six aircraft to improve its domestic service, its chief executive said on Monday.

“Our aim is to upgrade our 16 domestic routes throughout the country by adding new aircraft with a capacity between 70 to 80 seats,” Girma Wake told a news conference.

“Such planes would allow passengers to fly in comfort and would also help the airlines to generate more income,” he said.

He said the airline was evaluating offers from Canada’s Bombardier, CATIC International Holdings of China, Embraer of Brazil, French-Italian ATR, Sukhoi Super Jet and Mitsubishi.

With the purchase of the six planes, the number of aircraft servicing domestic routes would reach 13, he said.

Ethiopian is also in the process of acquiring ten Boeing 787 jetliners to be delivered in 2009. The airline owns 32 aircraft and serves 50 international destinations.