Health

It's raining in Ethiopia. After three consecutive years of drought, weather watchers say this year's early season rains are promising. But Ethiopia's farmers are looking forward to a bumper crop that could ease the country's severe food shortage.

By a Staff Reporter Following this week's Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) warning of increased huinger, the Ethiopia government rejected the report saying it was not backed by evidence.

It wasn’t famine that killed Jamal Ali’s mother. She died in a cholera outbreak that swept through their Ethiopian village when at last the rains came. Twenty-five years later Jamal, now a parent himself, is lining up for handouts in a food distribution centre in Harbu, Amhara, His prematurely aged face, hollow with hunger, creases further when asked about this unwelcome return. “It is a very bitter feeling. No one likes this begging. I am ashamed,” he said.

Technological advances in rice production have enabled China to feed an additional 60 million people per year since 1978, while investments in agriculture by farmers in Niger have revitalised an estimated 5 million hectares of land and improved access to food for at least 1 million people.

The escapades of Somali pirates made headlines last week. But the media has ignored the injustice behind the phenomenon, writes Simon Assaf

NAIROBI, 14 November 2008 (IRIN) - At least 300,000 people will require humanitarian aid in the next three months due to flash flooding and landslides, as well as continuing conflict, the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) warned.

Oct 8 (Reuters) - Soaring food prices, supply fears among import-dependent countries and rising demand for biofuels have driven up investment in agricultural land, notably in Africa.

IJARA, 21 August 2008 (IRIN) - For the past ten months, health workers at Ijara District Hospital in Kenya's North Eastern Province have been caring for two children, aged six and seven, who were abandoned by their father after he discovered he was HIV-positive. Nurses say the children were weak, malnourished and suffering from tuberculosis when they arrived.

NAIROBI, 12 August 2008 (IRIN) - Drought and recent fighting around the town of Beletweyne, in central Somalia's Hiiraan region, have aggravated the plight of at least 1,000 Ethiopian refugee families, who were already facing acute food shortages, local sources told IRIN.