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3:13 African leaders: Ebola could lead to food crisis
Financial aid and global coordination are needed to prevent the Ebola health care crisis from becoming a food emergency, agriculture ministers from West African nations at the center of the Ebola epidemic said Wednesday.
In Sierra Leone, where thousands are infected and more than 900 have died, 40 percent of the nation's farmers have abandoned their fields, said Joseph Sam Sesay, minister of agriculture, forestry and food security.
The region of the country that grows coffee and cocoa beans has been struck hard by Ebola. About 90 percent of agricultural exports are grown there.
'Farms have been abandoned. Some families have been wiped away. Some villages have been wiped away. It is very serious,' he said. 'We have to understand that agriculture is the mainstay of our economies if agriculture is down our economies will be down.'
The nation's economy was expected to grow more than 11 percent this year until Ebola struck in May. Now growth is only predicted to be around 3 percent, he said. Liberia Agriculture Minister Florence Chenoweth says billions of dollars of outside agricultural investment is gone as farming has been decimated.
Liberia expected 9 percent economic growth but has ratcheted it down twice to about 2 percent, Agriculture Minister Florence Chenoweth said. The nation had attracted $17.6 billion of foreign investment of which $7 was for agricultural development but those investors have left.
Still, she says no one is giving up and a recovery plan has been developed.
'We are very determined, very resilient people,' she said. 'We have not as ministers of agriculture put forward a recovery plan for nothing. We will implement that plan... and rebuild our country's agricultural sector.'
Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a financial institution of United Nations based in Rome, said the Ebola epidemic is strangling regional trade and it could 'lead to a hunger crisis of epic proportions for West Africa.'
International help is needed now with food assistance and medical help to stem the spread of Ebola, he said.
'It is unfortunate that the international community does not look up to crises when they occur in what I call the forgotten world, the invisible world where people die in rural areas from drought or disease until it grows out of proportion or until it begins to effect the larger international community,' he said. 'When there's a crisis in Timbuktu it doesn't stay in Timbuktu anymore. Nowadays it reverberates in Paris, London, Berlin, and Washington.'
The officials spoke at the World Food Prize Foundation annual meeting in Des Moines where government, academic, corporate, nonprofit agriculture and food experts gather to discuss issues of hunger and boosting agricultural productivity. (AP)
1:56 A.M. Boehner says U.S. should consider travel ban from countries with Ebola
U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said on Wednesday that President Barack Obama should 'absolutely consider' a temporary ban on travel to the United States from countries suffering an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
'Today we learned that one individual who has contracted the virus flew to Ohio through the Cleveland airport in the last few days,' Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement.
'A temporary ban on travel to the United States from countries afflicted with the virus is something that the president should absolutely consider along with any other appropriate actions as doubts about the security of our air travel systems grow,' he said. (Reuters)
12:05 A.M. USAID says Ebola nations following right approach
The leaders of the affected countries are clearly committed to fighting the disease and with international help are taking the right approaches to stop the transmission of the virus, said the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development Rajiv Shah.
'The thing I learned is that the strategy is clear, the partners are aligned and now we have to focus on accelerating implementation and every day is a race to do more and get on top of the transmission,' he told bberitaa.blogspot.com from the airport as he was leaving Sierra Leone and heading to Guinea. (AP)
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