Ethiopia Asks Foreign Aid for 4.5 Million Facing Famine

The government of Ethiopia made an urgent appeal Friday for foreign aid, saying 4.5 million people face starvation in war-torn northern Ethiopia five years after an estimated 1 million people perished there in another famine.

Ethiopia’s high new figure included half a million people displaced from the rebel-occupied province of Tigre and 400,000 inhabitants of Asmara, Ethiopia’s second-largest city, which has been recently cut off from the Red Sea port of Massawa.

Yilma Tadesse, the head of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, spoke as he was briefing U.N. Undersecretary General Abdul-Rahim Farah about northern Ethiopia, hit by drought and racked by civil war.