Kenyan drought raises need for food aid

Tom Maliti

NAIROBI, Kenya — The number of Kenyans who will depend on food aid this year may rise well past the current 3.5 million, the head of the U.N. food agency said Sunday.

Kenya — suffering from a prolonged drought — may also need food aid beyond February 2007, World Food Program Executive Director James Morris told reporters. He said the effects from the drought are not subsiding and it appeared unlikely Kenya would have the rain it needs for a good harvest.

The Kenyan government, the WFP, the U.N. and other aid agencies carried out a study in January that found Kenya’s number of food aid-dependent people had risen to 3.5 million, from 2.5 million in December.

Kenya needs 396,500 metric tons (437,000 U.S. tons) of food aid until February 2007, the study found. But “there is nothing that’s happened in the last 60 days, to the best of my knowledge, that will cause us to think that this situation is getting better,” Morris said.

Morris said the drought has stretched on for five to six years, and for 2006, “the weather forecast is not good.”

He spoke after visiting the Kenyan village of El Wak, which the agency sees as illustrative of the effects of prolonged drought across the Horn of Africa region, where a total of 11.5 million people need food aid.

El Wak is on the border with Somalia and 675 kilometers (419 miles) northeast of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

On Saturday, World Food Program spokesman Peter Smerdon said the agency needs $225 million until February 2007 to buy about 30,000 metric tons of food each month to feed 3.5 million Kenyans dependent on aid, but has only received $28 million to date.

The World Food Program has enough cereals to last until April, but will run out of the less important vegetable oil and pulses by month’s end, Smerdon said.

In January, Kenya Meteorological Department Director Joseph Mukabana said Kenya’s latest drought is the worst in at least 22 years — more severe than the drought of 1984, which had been labeled as one of Kenya’s worst, or any other drought after that.

He said there would lower water levels in Kenya’s dams, which the country relies on to generate most of its electricity. In February, the City Council of Nairobi began a water rationing program because of the drought.

(Associated Press)