Ethiopia’s prime minister called on the West at the end of February to reform damaging trade policies and increase development aid to help his country break its 20-year-long cycle of poverty and famine.
Warning that millions of Ethiopians still face the threat of starvation because of the slow response to the current famine, Meles Zenawi said his country could run out of food by June.
‘The pledges haven’t been as much as we had hoped for and there has been a slackening in the pace of delivery,” Zenawi said in an interview with The Guardian. ‘We are running out of reserves.”
Aid donors have pledged about half the 1,4-million tonnes of food the United Nations says Ethiopia needs to feed its people this year. With the rainy season approaching and long lags in the food pipeline, aid agencies say the next few months will be critical.
‘The message for donors is that they need to get the bulk of the food in by June because once the rains start it will be much more difficult to get it to the most vulnerable people,” said Jamie Balfour-Paul, an Africa policy adviser at Oxfam.
Zenawi expressed concern that the crisis in Iraq is diverting the world’s attention from the unfolding tragedy in sub-Saharan Africa. At a meeting in Downing Street, he urged British Prime Minister Tony Blair to keep Africa near the top of the agenda when leaders of the eight most powerful economies meet in June.
Zenawi expressed disappointment that the West was backtracking on its promise to reform world trade rules in the interests of developing countries. Most European countries are insisting that developing countries dismantle trade barriers while resisting calls for reforms of their own highly protected farming, he said. —