Eritrea's humanitarian
situation worsens - UN
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ASMARA, June 23 (Reuters) -
After five years of drought, Eritrea's difficult humanitarian situation
is deteriorating due to poor food supply and production, tensions with
Ethiopia and the protracted nature of the crisis, a U.N. report said.
Almost two thirds of the Red
Sea nation's estimated 3.6 million population depend on food aid, and
last year's harvest was less than half of the average for the past 12
years.
"Factors such as low
production, inflation of market prices and insufficient food assistance
being distributed, has further exhausted already overstretched coping
mechanisms of the poor," said the U.N. report issued this week.
It was analysing donors'
response to the United Nations' $157 million 2005 appeal for
humanitarian projects in Eritrea. It was more than 50 percent reached
half-way through the year.
Cereal price inflation of
between 50 and 100 percent, and high livestock prices were exacerbating
the situation, it said, as well as increased control on foreign currency
remittances and "overall security concerns".
Ethiopia and Eritrea have
been unable to demarcate their boundary since a 1998-2000 border war.
"The no-war/no-peace
environment has restricted micro- and macroeconomic activities,
especially as smaller scale and petty trade have traditionally been at
the core of the livelihoods of many farmers and pastoralists," the U.N.
report said.
"Many investment programmes
are postponed, and families are often missing their menfolk as a result
of conscription."
The U.N. report said that
in a nutritional survey of four out of six administrative districts at
the end of last year, an average 14 percent of children and 40 percent
of women were acutely malnourished.
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[Mai Habar Information Desk]
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