Press Release

12th June 2008

Ethiopia is starving again.
WHAT HAPPENED TO GELDOF’S VISION?

Children's charity Feed The Children UK has launched an appeal for drought stricken Ethiopia where 3.4m people are judged to be in critical need of emergency help. This new humanitarian disaster in Ethiopia is approaching a scale not seen since the eighties and the charity is emphasising that the urgent need is for long term solutions as much as emergency aid. Due to poor harvests, there is less food and what food there is has rocketed in price, out of the reach of huge sections of the population.

Feed The Children UK's chief executive officer, Brian Main, said, "I am shocked and horrified by the images on the news recently.It seems that evenafter the famine of the eighties, we have hardly begun to help developing communities in an effective, sustainable way.

“Feed The Children puts its community development programmes at the heart of its work. We are involved in providing emergency relief as well as projects that develop the community and educate children. That is the way to lift people out of the desperate poverty we are now seeing on the news,” continues Brian. 

FTC is supporting a number of development programmes in Ethiopia, which includes building a technical school that will cater for 500 students, including a number with special needs - often the most vulnerable group of all. Vocational training facilities include a brick works, a workshop for building barns and fences and a dairy farm with 40 cows.  The farm not only teaches young people animal husbandry, but also provides an income for the programme, from the sale of surplus milk.

“We therefore need people to contribute both to our emergency appeal for food and our long-term projects to help disadvantaged communities acquire the skills and knowledge they need to build their own long-term, sustainable solutions,” says Brian.

Feed The Children works worldwide, as well as within the UK, to develop sustainable communities and provide food and other necessities for those in great need.  The charity concentrates aid on children suffering the effects of poverty, especially those who have been orphaned or abandoned. The charity believes that wherever there is famine, conflict, disease or poverty, it is always the children who are most vulnerable.

If you would like to find out more about Feed The Children UK’s work, please ring 0118 932 0095 or visit www.feedthechildren.org.uk now.

ENDS

For further information call:  Sue Hinton or David Saunderson at DSH PR on 01252 408820.   Issued on behalf of Feed The Children UK (charity no. 1034916) by DSH Public Relations – 01252 408820, fax 01252 375027, email pr@dshpr.co.uk