Famine Crisis Over in 8 African Nations, U.N. Agency Says

A U.N. agency dealing with Africa’s famine said Friday that the crisis is over in eight of the 21 nations that faced exceptional food supply problems in 1984-85. But it said the emergency is acute in five countries.

The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization said in its latest report on Africa’s food situation, issued in Nairobi, that the countries now out of danger are Burundi, Kenya, Lesotho, Morocco, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

“The drought has been broken, the weather conditions have favored 1985 main season harvests, and the food supply situation is back to normal,” the FAO report said of the eight nations.

The U.N. agency said, however, that the food emergency is “most acute” in Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger and Sudan, partly because of port congestion and other problems in distributing food aid throughout the countries.

At Ethiopian Ports

In Ethiopia, for example, the FAO said that as of late June, about 175,000 tons of grain had piled up at the country’s Red Sea ports of Assab and Massawa and at the harbor in neighboring Djibouti, which also is used to funnel food to Ethiopia.