Eritrea Faces Another Year of Food Shortage: WFPAbout 1 million Eritreans still face hunger nearly a year after their country's border conflict with Ethiopia ceased, officials of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) said Wednesday in Nairobi.They said that the WFP has launched a muti-billion dollar appeal to provide emergency relief food to Eritreans still struggling to meet their basic food needs. The UN agency is asking for 44 million U.S. dollars to fund over 102,000 tons of food to cover the food shortages from May 2001 to February 2002, the officials said, adding that the number of Eritreans WFP will feed this year increases by 300,000 over last year. The border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which broke out in May 1998, forced hundreds of thousands of families to flee their homes and land. Many of these people are farmers from Eritrea's richest agricultural areas, and the combined effect of drought and war have pushed the price of increasingly scarce basic foodstuffs beyond the means of most families. |
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