By Emmanuel Goujon
Sunday, November 05, 2006
"Over the years, the Somali region of Ethiopia has suffered from cycles of droughts and floods," the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said.
According to the WFP, around 1,5 million farmers "require urgent humanitarian assistance as large numbers of livestock died, wells and boreholes dried up, malnutrition rates increased and disease became rampant."
The latest flooding has been caused by a sudden rise in the level of the river Wabe Shebelle, swollen by heavy rains, whose depth had doubled at the end of last week.
Flooding from the river had practically cut off the worst-affected towns of Kelafo and Musthail, 80 and 150km from Gode, the capital of the Somali region, humanitarian experts said.
The latest death toll issued by the Ethiopian authorities said 68 people had died in the recent floods and thousands had been made homeless.
The toll included five people taken by crocodiles lurking in the flood waters, said Muktar Mohamed, the flood emergency coordinator for the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Bureau (DPPA) in Gode.
Another six people had been injured in crocodile attacks, he added.
"The death toll has been climbing, because reports are coming in slowly from the affected places," he said.
Mohamed said that 17 000 hectares of land and 2 000 livestock had been lost in the flooding, which had affected nearly 280 000 people in 94 villages.
"We still don't have a precise figure for displaced people," he added.
The DPPA has begun distributing humanitarian aid of cereals, pulses and vegetable oil, while the WFP has made available 1 374 metric tons of grain from its stocks.
South-east Ethiopia is still reeling from flash floods in August and September, which left 639 dead and affected over 350 000 people, again chiefly hitting the Somali region.
"One wonders how much an already vulnerable and fragile group of people are expected to bear," said the WFP's representative in Ethiopia, Mohamed Diab.
"At least WFP can ensure that many of those who may have already lost everything have something to eat," he told AFP.
But even this modest goal is hard to achieve by land because roads have been washed away and large tracts of territory are under water and full of crocodiles and snakes.
"As access to the flood-affected area is difficult, dropping food to survivors from aircraft is being considered," the WFP and the DPPA said.
Ethiopia's war-ravaged neighbour and northeast Kenya are also both affected by the flooding.
"Based on the latest flood watch reports, we fear the situation could get worse for the Juba region (in southern Somalia)," Matthew Olins, deputy head of Somalia's UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP.
Olins said "small-scale damage" was already being recorded in the areas around the Somali capital Mogadishu.
The majority of observers are pessimistic about the situation in the Horn of Africa and see little hope of an end to the heavy floods and droughts that have plagued the region in deadly cycles for decades.
Source: AFP, Nov 5, 2006