Nairobi - A severe drought in Ethiopia is endangering six million children with many of them in need of urgent treatment for severe malnutrition, the United Nations children's agency said Tuesday. "Up to six million children under five years of age are living in impoverished, drought-prone districts and require urgent preventive health and nutritional care," UNICEF said in a statement.
UNICEF said that the drought and food price hikes had created the worst humanitarian crisis since 2003, and that an estimated 126,000 children desperately needed treatment for malnutrition.
"Widespread drought, poor rainy seasons, heavy loss of livestock, limited food supply and soaring prices of food, fuel and fertilizer linked to the global food crisis are contributing to the troubled outlook for children in Ethiopia," the body said.
Food security in East African nations is increasingly at risk from rising prices, drought and violence, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned Monday that some 2.6 million people in Somalia also faced a food crisis.
The situation has dramatically deteriorated in the conflict-ridden Horn of Africa nation due to soaring food prices, a significantly devalued Somali shilling, and worsening drought, the FAO said.
The FAO has appealed for 18.4 million dollars in emergency aid for Somalia in 2008, but to date it has only received around 3.7 millions dollars from Sweden and Italy.
The World Food Programme is also seeking hundreds of millions of dollars to help with the Ethiopian crisis.
Kenya is also facing problems, with this year's harvest expected to plummet due to the post-election violence that displaced many farmers, a plague of army worms that have devastated maize crops and a fungal infection that has slashed rich production.
Agriculture Minister William Ruto, speaking at an anti-hunger march in Nairobi on Saturday, said that there would be a major food shortage in August as food reserves run out before the new harvest begins.
