John O'Shea, Irish Mirror, 21st June 2008

CHARITY BOSS IN PASSIONATE PLEA FOR ETHIOPIA

As famine on the scale of the 1984 disaster once more threatens the people of Ethiopia, GOAL chief John O'Shea, tells the Irish Daily Mirror how the equivalent of Ireland's population is starving.

And white much of the blame can be placed at the door of reckless African governments, the West's silence, he says, is deafening.

THE casual callousness of Third World governments to their people only seems matched by the breathtaking indifference of the international community.

The latest example comes out of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia where 4.smillion people are at risk from starvation.

Soaring world food prices mean basic foodstuffs are increasingly out of the reach of the poorest of the poor.

But this has not stopped its government from announcing plans to produce bio-fuels to cut high oil import bills.

The Ethiopian government has blithely dismissed fears that such a ruinous strategy could further hit food production in a country already suffering terribly from severe drought.

Millions of Ethiopians need emergency food because the rains never came and spiralling food prices gravely add to the problem.

The searing scars of the country's 1984-1985 famine, which killed more than a million, have not had time to heal, as the spectre of mass starvation once more stalks the land.

But the plight of the people means nothing. It is the country's EUR600million fuel bill that concerns them and it plans to slash this using bio-fuels.

In 1983, 1994 and in 2007 drought brought disaster. The camera lenses will soon be focusing on the emaciated and starving and Ethiopia's earth will once more open to mass burials unless there is an international aid effort to avert catastrophe. Aid is now a matter of life and death for the survival of millions.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said six million people already need food aid and he estimated the number facing starvation could rise to 15 million early in the New Year if international donors did not come to the country's aid.

Severely malnourished children have a 25 to 50 per cent chance of dying if untreated.

This is especially alarming in a country devoid of food and water and where there are six million children under the age of five.

Aid workers say pledges from donor governments aren't coining fast enough, and with world attention understandably fixed on disaster-stricken China and Burma the gravity of the situation could easily be ignored.

To avert disaster the Ethiopian government must abandon the crazy notion of cutting back on agricultural land to produce ethanol. The situation is already desperate because the crops now being sown will not be available in time to stave off mass starvation.

The Irish Government continues to route hundreds of millions through the Ethiopian government. This aid should give our government leverage to persuade the Ethiopians to act immediately and avert disaster by allowing an all-out emergency relief effort to be mounted.

I saw the hellish consequences of mass starvation in Ethiopia in 1984. More than two decades later it is impossible to believe the world could stand by and allow famine strike a third time and do nothing.

But unless the international lethargy is shaken off and political leaders wake up to the suffering then millions may die, and once more the strong will have failed to look after the weak.