From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Sat Jul 05 2008 - 19:41:07 EDT
War, drought and inflation threaten Horn with disaster: UNICEF
Sunday 6 July 2008
NAIROBI (AFP) - A deadly cocktail of calamities -- including war,
drought and rising prices -- is engulfing the Horn of Africa,
threatening its children with suffering of disastrous proportions, the
UN's Children Fund warned Wednesday.
"A lethal mix of drought, expanding conflict, rising food and energy
prices, disease, and high poverty is pushing children and their families
in the Greater Horn of Africa to the brink of disaster," UNICEF said in
a statement.
"Ethiopia and Somalia are the worst affected, but parts of Eritrea,
Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda show ominously similar signs," it added.
"The time to act is now, to save children's lives," Per Engebak,
UNICEF's regional director for East and Southern Africa, said in the
statement.
UNICEF said global acute malnutrition rates in Somalia topped 20
percent, while millions of people were food insecure in neighbouring
Ethiopia.
It also sounded alarm bells over the deteriorating humanitarian
situation in Uganda's pastoralist region of Karamoja and said that an
estimated 1.2 million people, many of them children, needed emergency
food aid in Kenya.
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