Lives To Be Saved In Africa

With millions of people threatened by food shortages, the U.N. special envoy for the Horn of Africa toured the cracked land of this drought-stricken Ethiopian town Wednesday, promising that "we can save lives."

Catherine Bertini visited emergency feeding centers in Gode in southeastern Ethiopia, the region hardest hit by the three-year drought. Millions of people are threatened by lack of food in Ethiopia alone, and millions more lives are imperiled elsewhere in this part of the continent.

Hundreds of people have already died in the area, home to ethnic Somalis.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan "asked me to come on this mission in an effort to do whatever to avoid this problem spreading throughout the region," Bertini told reporters at Gode's airstrip. "We can save lives and help people work through this terrible disaster."

Bertini is on a weeklong tour of the region to assess the needs of the millions threatened by the drought.

After touring two supplementary feeding centers with a total of about 2,000 children under age 5, and a therapeutic feeding center with 148 severely malnourished people, Bertini said her visit was motivation to increase support to the region.

"The number of people who are moving to this area is increasing," she said. "We need more water access, medicine and need more food for adults and children."

She said aid workers were hoping to set up additional feeding centers, so places like Gode do not become overrun with the hungry, many of them nomadic pastoralists who come only once they're in desperate need.

Local health officers said the problem had been reduced in Gode in the last month, from 3-4 deaths per day of children under age 5 in January and February to 1-2 deaths every few days now.

But Gode, despite its hungry people and land devoid of vegetation, is among the lucky places. Here there are feeding centers, and airstrips for planes loaded with tons of supplies and aid workers.

On Wednesday morning, the International Committee of the Red Cross landed a plane in Gode carrying 15 metric tons of emergency food aid.

But the Ethiopian government has appealed for 836,800 metric tons of food aid to assist some 7.7 million people threatened with starvation as a result of the drought.

With Ethiopia mired in a 23-month war with neighboring Eritrea, the government is unable to muster sufficient resources to address the food shortages on its own.

Meanwhile, food and water shortages threaten Somalia with disaster unless rain relieves severe drought, U.N. officials said Wednesday.

The shortages already affect up to 650,000 people in Somalia, the United Nations said in a statement faxed to news organizations in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The hardest hit regions are Bakool, Gedo, Bay and Hiran, the statement said.

Local Somali officials also say 31 children have died of cholera in the past three days in the area around Dinsor, about 320 kilometers 200 miles) northwest of Mogadishu. Patients are being brought to a quarantine facility in the village of Gurban in wheelbarrows.

About 60 kilometers (37 miles) to the north, more than 22 people have died since Sunday. More people are in hospitals. The disease has been especially rife among people already weakened by famine.

The U.N.'s World Food Program, which Bertini also heads, estimates that 12.4 million people are at risk in the region that includes Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Somalia. Bertini will visit all the countries except Somalia on her trip.

CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that unless there's a sharp increase in Western aid, tragedy will repeat itself.

"Our concern is that the food supply is going to run out at the end of June," says the World Food Program's Judith Lewis. "Thats all the resources the WFP has so far."

Ethiopia alone has appealed for more than 800,000 tons of food. The U.S. and Europe have pledged help, but aid workers on the ground warn that it has to be long term, not just a stop-gap measure.

According to Mike Delaney of Oxfam USA, "Were seeing many families who have lost their cattle, their sheep, have sold their tools and seeds for the next harvest. This is going to have long-term implications, because people arent going to have seeds or tools for the next planting."

The impending famine is a combination of nature and man both going wrong at the same time. Three years of drought ruined harvests and decimated the animal herds. Last year, Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea decided to go to war over a piece of apparently useless land along their mutual border. The fighting slowed both interest in the drought and the flow of aid.

When the LIVE AID concert took place in 1984, rock stars rallied the world's sympathy. The question this time is, why do we have to reach the point of disaster before the world reacts to prevent it becoming a human catastrophe?