Four-foot cornstalks sprout from rain-soaked earth, and wind billows fields of teff, the staple Ethiopian grain. Goats and cattle are getting fat on lush grasses — but the children are still dying.
“It’s strange to see hunger when everything is so green,” said Wariso Shete, 26, a southern Ethiopia farmer who recently buried his 3-year-old son. “But there is no food. The boy just starved.”
It is hard to believe that the world has been living with the Aids epidemic for a quarter of a century.As 20,000 delegates meet in Mexico City for the 17th International Aids Conference, there is much progress to report, but some setbacks, too.
The number of AIDS deaths worldwide dropped 10% in 2007 because of increasing access to treatment, as did the number of new infections in children, the United Nations reported Tuesday.Condom use and prevention efforts increased in many countries and adolescent sexual intercourse declined in some of the most heavily affected regions, the report says.
President Bush plans to sign a bill next week that commits the United States to spending about $40 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS overseas, a major expansion of what many consider his most successful foreign policy initiative.
UNITED NATIONS, June 9 — About 3 million people infected with the AIDS virus in the developing world received life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs last year, a 42 percent increase over 2006 in the number with access to the medicines, a U.N. report said Monday.
It is a strange and unsettling ride west from the Ethiopian town of Shashamene. The fields are vibrant green. There is water in the creeks. The soil is a deep rich burgundy.
However, the people here speak of a “green drought”.
It is the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted.
The U.S. Africa Command, designed to boost America’s image and prevent terrorist inroads on the continent, has scaled back its ambitions after African governments refused to host it and aid groups protested plans to expand the military’s role in economic development in the region.
MONROVIA, Liberia — The second sushi bar to open in ragged postwar Liberia did not settle for having its chefs wear simple T-shirts, or for serving $25 worth of sliced fish on plain white plates.
RAMAPHOSA INFORMAL SETTLEMENT, South Africa — This was the kind of place that was not supposed to exist in the new South Africa. All black. All poor. Dense, squalid, dirty, angry — with charred patches of earth where men once stood.
Up to 6 million children under the age of five are at risk of malnutrition in Ethiopia because of rising cereal prices and the failure of rains, the UN’s children agency, Unicef, has warned.
World Hunger Education 
